ACE with sticky http-cookies across two server farms issue

Question

Hi,
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We need the same sticky http cookie to applied to two server farms (which are actually the same servers but listening on different ports in each farm) to persist sessions to the same real backend server.
e.g.
Farm1 (front end HTTP service) - StickyGroup1
rserver1 - 192.168.0.1:80
rserver2 - 192.168.0.2:80
rserver3 - 192.168.0.3:80
Farm2 (SSL front end authentication service) - StickyGroup2
rserver1 - 192.168.0.1:443
rserver2 - 192.168.0.2:443
rserver3 - 192.168.0.3:443
We have setup two Sticky Groups (one for each of the farms above) both using the same cookie name e.g. cookieXYZ
Our service is behind a single virtual server configured as follows (example URL and addresses):
Virtual Server Configuration
Virtual server name: www.somedomain.com
Virtual IP: 2.2.2.2
TCP/443 (https)
SSL Termination - Proxy service name: www.somedomain.com (all keys and certs loaded and correct)
L7 Load Balancing - **inline** rule match HTTP URL:(/AuthenticateMe/).*  Action : Sticky, Group: StickyGroup2, SSL Initiation enabled (www.somedomain.com)
Default L7 Load Balancing action : Sticky, Group: StickyGroup1
So normally we would expect users to first hit www.somedomain.com first and therefore Farm1, get cookieXYZ from the ACE (cookie insert is only enabled on StickyGroup1) and then be redirected to www.somedomain.com/AuthenticateMe which matches the inline URL L7 rule which directs the request at Farm2 - at this point we expected the ACE to use cookieXYZ to persist the user to the same real server hit in Farm1 but instead the stickiness doesn't seem to work.
We suspect that the ACE uses IP:port as the unique value in the Cookie ID and therefore the ACE fails to match the same real host in a different farm because we are using a mix of port numbers across farms. Is this correct? Is there another way of accomplishing what we are after with a different configuration but still the same setup with single VIP and multiple services on the backend servers?
Any suggestions or solutions appreciated.
Thanks
Paul

Answer 1

The issue is related to the fact that it's not about persistence because there are only "new" services in the backend in SSL, you want to keep the IP address.
With a little bit of dev, the only way to acheive this is to redirect the user when he has been sent to http and adding a "tag" (cookie / token in the URL), then on the SSL virtual server, when performing SSL offload matching this tag to send to user to the right server. But it will be a 1-to-1 mapping.