First, thank you. The idea of prepping the persistence for the 2nd connection while we're doing the first is badass. I believe the problem i'm really running into is that was trying to avoid creating 100 different pools (one for each possible port), however i'm going to have to give up on that idea. I believe the interpreter is correctly telling me that I cannot set persistence for this connection because I'm not telling it to actually load balance anything.
To that end, i'm going to create pools for each of the ports I need. Then I can take advantage of your other suggestion of letting the system handle the round robin function. The persistence expiration on the 2nd connection isn't a huge concern. This thing is supposed to stay connected (sending data, TCP keepalives, etc), and if the 2nd connection drops the 1st one is disconnected by the server. Basically, i'll never have more than 1 connection on port 49152.