Brocade ADX – Configuring a Port Policy

Summary

Typically health-checks are assigned on a per virtual server basis. However this can become cumbersome if you have a large number of virtual servers configured.
Via the use of a Port Policy health-checks are configured within the Port Policy. The Port Policy is then assigned to multiple Virtual Servers.

Syntax

Below shows the required commands (note: this example uses the ‘protocol http url‘ command to build a HTTP GET request with the Headers Host and User-Agent):

http match-list matchlist1
  default down
  up simple "STRING1" log

server port-policy PORTPOLICY1
  protocol http
  protocol http url "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:[domain].com\r\nUser-Agent:ADX\r\n\r\n"
  protocol http content-match matchlist1
 
server virtual VS-TEST1 192.168.200.1
  port http
  port http use-port-policy PORTPOLICY1

Tips

  • When adding the ‘protocol http url’ command the HTTP response codes that the Brocade expects back from the web server are 200-299 and 401. To change this behavior the following command is used ‘protocol http status-code [start-code] [end-code]’.
  • When adding a URL that contains a ? character you will need to escape it out by using the \ character. An example when adding ‘/index?.html‘ you will need to use the following syntax ‘/index\?.html’.

Caveat

The port-policy implementation does not interact with port aliasing or mulitbind ports. Because of this when configuring the port policy on multiple virtual servers that share the same real server. Only the first port-policy in the configuration will be used. Because of this it is recommend to either ,

  • Only use port-policies on the real servers.
  • Only use port-policies on the virtual server if you are using different backend servers.

 

Rick Donato
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