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Gary_T_31565's avatar
Gary_T_31565
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Apr 10, 2007

Can IIS session state be handled by BIG-IP

Hello,

 

 

I am new here and to this domain. Last week we had F5 present to us. We are about to order 3400s in active/passive to lab. We are a small company but prepared to spend the money on this. Our volume is low but high value.

 

 

I need to load balance a web farm. I am looking at how I manage session state. MS suggest using IIS6 session state service or use SQL server. We have a SQL cluster but not sure about performance as yet. The IIS6 service could be used but the service runs on a single host.

 

 

As the BIG-IP will be fault tolerate can it handle the session state tables or even emulate the IIS6 session state service? It would be a nice feature if available but Pre-sales guys could not answer.

 

 

Or am I missing something like persistence cookies do this anyway?

 

 

Thanks

 

Gary
application delivery
dev
devops
iRules

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  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Apr 10, 2007
    Hi,

     

     

    Many people use BIG-IP to perform the authentication; but full session state management is typically something done on the web servers using either system memory or on a database.

     

     

    BIG-IP persistence functionality ensures that clients are directed to the same web server over multiple requests. The underlying reason to persist a client is to make sure the client is sent to the web server that has their session information. This allows you to load balance multiple web servers without a requirement for the web servers to share state information with each other.

     

     

    What kind of state management are you currently doing on the web servers? What are you considering offloading to the BIG-IP?

     

     

    Assuming you're able to ensure that clients are persisted to the same web server they created the session with, is there any reason you would want/need to offload the state information to the BIG-IP?

     

     

    Aaron
  • Gary_T_31565's avatar
    Gary_T_31565
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Apr 10, 2007

     

    Hi,

     

     

    Our devs are still writing ASP.Net/MSMQ/SQL based application, its a portal with single log on and many different ordering systems all based with us but potentially on different IIS servers. We lab in a few weeks so I have no idea what state info is needed as yet, hopefully very little. Unfortunately the devs are not writing code based on Big-ip capabilities such as authenication. For a small company we are building in a lot of redundancy (fw clusters, aggregated switches, SAN etc..) and we have two months to do it all!

     

     

    I'm here just picking brains really. My thinking is the big-ip can do so much for a web farm and the community write shared code is the session state handled by one of them.

     

     

    Looking to cover these senarios:

     

     

    User experience not affected across ordering systems when server/software fails.

     

    User experience not affected during maintenance period.

     

     

  • Bien_Nguyen_Tha's avatar
    Bien_Nguyen_Tha
    Historic F5 Account
    Nov 20, 2015

    Hi all, Any other solution for this? I have a customer which need to remove the Session-State server (which run on a single SQL server)