Varnish w/hardware loadbalancing woes

[Copper, Candace L]

I've looked all over for information on how to configure varnish to use a VIP and have not been able to find much - so I'm hoping someone here can assist.

Our setup goes like this: Hardware Loadbalancer (sticky sessions enabled) with one VIP(perf-drupal.domain.com) directs to three Apache identical webservers (each running Varnish - (perf-drupal1.domain.com, perf-drupal2.domain.com & perf-drupal3.domain.com)). With the VCL that we currently have, it works like a charm on each individual server, but when we try to use the VIP we get errors (50% of the time) when trying to access the site, stating that it is not available.

I've tried:

backend newsite {
    .host = "localhost";
    .port = "8080";
}
set req.http.host = "perf-drupal.domain.com";
set req.backend = newsite;

and using the default backend:

backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "8080";
}

I've read about the DNS Director, but that's not available in the version I have installed - 2.1.3. But since we are only running one site, I don't know if it will help. I don't have access to any additional hardware, so I cannot split out Varnish from the Apache web server.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!  :)

Candace Copper


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