johnfilo_45702
Jul 21, 2010Nimbostratus
Long Persistent Sessions and no outage deployments
OK, my first post so go easy!!
My company is about to embark on deploying F5's in our environment and I would appreciate some thoughts on how I can go about solving a problem I have with long sessions and being able to provide a no outage deployments amongst a pair of backend J2EE WebSphere servers.
==== Start Scenario ====
F5 is load balancing 2 backend J2EE servers and we have session persistence to one of the two J2EE servers using the infamous JSESSIONID cookie. Session timeout for the persistent sessions is a massive 10 hours, mainly becuase of the call centre style environment and the business don't want our users having to repeat login through out their working day (yes I know, they are long but work with me!).
What we would like to achieve is no outage deployments, where by we can place one of the backend J2EE servers in offline mode, permit no new sessions or connection establishment on this server AND (the kicker) be able to transfer the existing persisted sessions to the other active server so we have no outage from a client point of view.
** We don't want to wait for the persistent sessions to time out on the server we would like to update
Once the new version of the webapp has been deployed, tested etc, we would like to route all new sessions to the newly updated server and let the other server "gracefully" drainstop all existing sessions whilst not allowing new sessions or connection establishment.
==== End Scenario ====
What I'm looking for I guess are some practical examples of how to acheive this, F5 setup recommendations and hopefully constructive conversation with people who have done this before already and are willing to share their lessons learned.
All comments are welcomed.
Thanks in advance.
John