SharePoint 2013 Load Balancing with F5

Question

I've a SharePoint 2013 farm with 1 FE 1 AP and 1 DB server. IIS worker proces on FE server costs high CPU sometimes and so I added a new FE server to my farm and now I've 2 FE 1 AP and 1 DB server on my farm and using F5 load balancer.

But there is an issue about load balancing. Users can reach SharePoint2013 web application just normal. But sometimes some users are getting 500 error and they aren't reaching web application. I guess it is because of high CPU costs on one server, again I guess F5 should redirect users to other server which has short response time. Page refresh can't solve the problem. But when I stop IIS on a server they can reach the web application. Is there an issue about F5 load balancing? What are F5 best practices on SharePoint 2013 load balancing?

P.S.: I am using least connection method on F5. FE servers have same configuration.

Answer 1

We had the same kind of issue with F5 load balancer where even we stop the AppPool the F5 was still sending the traffic to that server. It is basically configuration inside the F5.

Now we are using the .aspx page (any page you can pick) so F5 check that page if it is responding (i.e 200, 401, 403) we consider a valid response but if it is returning 503 or 500 then take the server out of the load balancer.

So you have to tweak your F5 config.

I dont have access to F5 but i told what we told our F5 admin to implement.