F5CAB3: BIG-IP Administration Data Plane Configuration

BIG-IP Least Connections (member) directs each new connection to the pool member with the fewest active connections, so its selection directly accounts for active connection load at the pool-member level.

Cookie persistence uses an HTTP cookie stored by each client to return that client to its previously selected pool member. It avoids treating every NATed client as the same source address, allowing initial client sessions to be distributed among pool members while retaining session affinity. Source-address affinity would map the shared NAT IP address to one member.

With priority-group activation set to a minimum of two active members, BIG-IP initially distributes connections to priority group 3. If priority groups 3 and 2 each have fewer than two available members, BIG-IP directs traffic to priority group 1. A priority-3 group with one failed member still has two active members, so traffic remains confined to that group.

A persistence profile maintains affinity between a client and a selected pool member. That affinity is honored for later traffic, so normal load-balancing selection may no longer distribute each new connection independently across the available members.

The virtual server must use UDP because conventional DNS queries are sent on UDP port 53. A TCP virtual server does not match those UDP flows. The configured /23 source network already includes both 192.168.101.100 and 192.168.101.200.