HP e-Commerce / XML director server appliance sa8250 - Users Guide

C H A P T E R 2 HP e-Commerce/XML Director Server Appliance SA8250 User Guide
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Application Message Traffic Management
The SA8250 was developed to perform load balancing in SSL
environments. The SA8250 allows users to load balance based on
application content (Layer 7, or RICH mode), as well as server
address and port (Layer 4, or HOT mode). SSL management is
handled independently of RICH mode processing. That is, once a
session is established and the message is decrypted, it is passed to the
SA8250’s RICH processing component. This allows even SSL traffic
to take full advantage of the features of the device, including error
recovery and session rollback.
The SA8250 allows non-encrypted traffic to be processed
independently of SSL traffic. The advantage of this is that it permits
load balancing (in either HOT or RICH mode) configuration on a per
virtual IP address, thus allowing you to isolate the impact of the SSL
processing. Many users tune their sites for maximum performance by
assigning HOT load balancing to all traffic except SSL.
One of other advantages of the SA8250 is its ability to recognize SSL
session IDs. This permits “sticky” (or persistent) sessions to be
established on a given server.
HTTPS Redirect
If desired, you can specify a page to return to the client if a successful
session cannot be negotiated because the client does not support the
required cipher suite. The SA8250 accomplishes this by sending an
HTTP 302 “redirect” message back to the client in the case of a cipher
negotiation failure. For example: The server supports 128-bit
encryption, but the client’s software is only capable of 40-bit
encryption.
The CLI parameter
redirectpage=<URL> sets which page the
client is redirected to.
where <URL> is the fully qualified location of the page. For
example:
redirectpage=http://www.companyname.com/
error.html.
The default configuration file setting is: redirectpage=none.