We're still looking for what I tried to describe at the start of this thread - a way to maintain the VIP/client-side connection (HTTP-Keepalive is currently in use), while allowing connections to be rebuilt on the Pool/server-side to be moved as necessary. We want to rotate hosts out of the pool for maintenance or other reasons, without having to wait as long as a few hours for the connections on them to clear.
You are asking for several different things that are mutually exclusivie:
Node Failures can be handled with the Action on Service Down. (Action on Service Down mainly effects existing connections to the server going down.)
Rotating Nodes in and out of a pool without allowing active or persistent connections to remain established and slowly die away as active sessions disappear is the only non-disruptive way of freeing a server. All other methods are intrustive or disruptive.
If you look at the available Pool Options, none of the sever connections:
- Enabled (All traffic allowed)
- Disabled (Only persistent or active connections allowed)
- Forced Offline (Only active connections allowed)
If you are not wanting to wait then it will require manual intervention on your part by either stopping the website, or fooling the F5 into believing that the server has "Failed" and executing a recovery (most likely with Action on Service Down).
My suggestion would either be stopping the website or by applying a Health Check that you know will fail (causing the F5 to change the Member Status to Offline).