Loadbalancing Webservers

Comradin · Jul 25, 2008, 1:53 PM

Hi,

as written in a post before I have two server running pfsense in front of three webservers. Using the loadbalancer I serve website requests to three webservers on the internal network.

My colleague now asked me about session stickyness and I had to show him a blank face as I do not know if sessions are sticky and where I could check for this. I have an old Intel NetStructure loadbalancer which will possibly be replaces by the servers running pfSense, but there I have control wether sessions will be sticky or not and if they are sticky how long will the stickyness last.

An example from the config:
Protocol port: 80
Sticky: src-ip
Sticky time out value: 90 (seconds)
Duplicate SYN time: 500000 (micro-seconds)
Maximum response time: 50 (milli-seconds)
Service priority: 1 (1 - highest to 5 - lowest)
Backup servers: disabled
Balancing strategy: Load Balanced

I know, the main purpose of pfSense is the firewalling and not the loadbalancing, but do I have a chance to configure things like this in the loadbalancing part of pfSense?

regards,
Comradin

Comradin · Jul 31, 2008, 9:16 AM

Hiho,

any hints on how to check if balanced sessions are sticky or not?

regards,
Comradin

ask · Aug 12, 2008, 6:19 PM

@Comradin:

any hints on how to check if balanced sessions are sticky or not?

Set it up and observe if your requests continue to hit a particular one of the backend servers.