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i've got a WAS environment whose topology looks like as below:(one typo here, that 'IH' should have been 'IHS')

The request from end-user goes through IHS and arrives in WAS1, then that application from WAS1 would call application service from its backend WAS2 CLUSTER to which the F5 device takes care of the load-balancing work.

And my question here is about the session tracking mechanism for WAS2 cluster. Once i enabled Memory-to-memory replication, can i use either cookies or URL rewriting right here? If so, do i need to make any manual configuration? If not, which tracking way can i use? and which can't? Why?

Please help explain as detail as possible!

Thanks in advance

enter image description here

wing2ofsky
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1 Answers1

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Cookie or URL rewriting has got nothing to do with Session replication. They are the vehicle for the client to send the session ID back to the server. Cookies are supported by default and you need to check a box to enable URL re-writing.

I have a few queries for you.

(1) Why is the WAS 1 not clustered? (or did you not want to show that in this picture).

(2) What role does it play ? Can that functionality be achieved via a plain IHS?

(3) Why use a F5 between WAS 1 and the WAS clusters? I don't understand how the F5 load balancer works. Usually the IHS uses the clone ID generated by WAS to understand which WAS server to route the request to. This is how session affinity is achieved in IHS+WAS. F5 might or might not be able to achieve this.

There is no configuration required in this structure above, except for enabling URL rewriting and ensuring that all links in the application code uses the encoded URL. I would prefer to stick with Cookies as that is the default approach and infact WAS would fail to work if cookies were turned off (as the LTPAToken which is used for security(auth/auth) is sent back to the client as a cookie)).

There is no harm in using URLre-writing except for the fact that one "unecoded URL Link" could lose the session for the user.

HTH

Manglu
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  • hi @Manglu, please see my answer as below: 1. WAS 1 is the cluster actually but i didn't show here. 2. Maybe it can be achieved via IHS, but the current one is defined architecture of customer, which i cannot change it. 3. as i said, that F5 device are being used here indeed. What i need to do is to help figure it out under current circumstance. – wing2ofsky Sep 20 '12 at 07:04