Radware Alteon Application Manual page 220

Alteon Application Switch Operating System Application Guide
Server Load Balancing
HTTP Layer 7 Content Switching
HTTP content switching uses HTTP content classes to match protocol element values. The HTTP
content class enables matching with the following protocol elements: URL hostname, URL path, URL
page name, URL page type, HTTP headers, cookies, text, and XML tags. Each value defined for the
elements can be a simple text match or a regular expression (regex) match. When using text match,
you can define the match for the exact string (equal), or for partial matching (contain, prefix,
suffix). When using regex, the expression is always matched with contain logic, meaning that it can
to appear anywhere in the matched element.
Alteon supports both HTTP1.0 and HTTP1.1 for Layer7 content switching.
Note: Alteon performs HTTP Layer 7 content switching before applying any modifications and is
based on the original requests.
The following sample use cases illustrate the feature range of Layer 7 content switching:
• URL-Based Server Load Balancing, page 220
• Virtual Hosting, page 226
• Cookie-Based Preferential Load Balancing, page 227
• Browser-Smart Load Balancing, page 231
• XML/SOAP-Based Server Load Balancing, page 234
• URL Hashing for Server Load Balancing, page 236
URL-Based Server Load Balancing
URL-based SLB enables you to optimize resource access and server performance. Content dispersion
can be optimized by making load-balancing decisions on the entire path and filename of each URL.
Consider an example where the following criteria are specified for Layer 7 content switching:
• Requests with ".cgi" in the URL path are load balanced between Real Servers 1 and 2.
• Requests with "images" in the URL path are load balanced between Real Servers 3 and 4.
• Requests with "secure" in the URL path are redirected to same URL over secure HTTP (HTTPS).
Requests containing URLs with anything else are load balanced between Real Servers 1 through 4.
Figure 39: URL-Based SLB Scenario
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Document ID: RDWR-ALOS-V2900_AG1302