Specifications
Example Match Rules
Equalizer Installation and Administration Guide 143
serving particular content for different web sites. For this example, we assume that a cluster with
five servers as shown below has already been defined
Figure66 Match Rule Example: Dedicated Image and Content Servers
We want to maintain persistent connections for the web site servers, assuming that some of the
websites may need to maintain sessions for applications such as shopping carts, email, etc.
Persistent connections are not necessary for the image servers, since they access the images from
common storage and have no need to maintain client sessions, so there is no need to incur the
performance impact of maintaining session information.
To do this, we’ll create two match rules, as follows:
1. Log into the Equalizer Administration Interface in Edit mode.
2. In the left frame, click the name of the Layer 7 cluster to which you want to add the rule. The
cluster screen appears in the right frame.
3. In the flags field, make sure that the once only and persist flags are not checked. This is
necessary because these flags, if enabled, cause only the first request in a connection to be
evaluated. Since we want content to come from one set of servers and images from another, we
want the servers that will have persistent connections to be chosen by the match rules.
If one or both of these flags is enabled, select menu > Change Cluster Parameters and make
sure both flags are not checked. Select commit to return to the cluster screen.
4. In the cluster screen, select menu > Add Match Rule. The create match rule screen appears
in the right frame.
5. Type images into the match name text box. In this match rule, we’ll construct an expression
that will match all the filename extensions of the images to be served. These requests will go to
the image servers.