Hardware Load Balancer problem

[Scott Persinger]

We recently switched from serving directly from Apache to using Varnish in front as a cache.

So we have:

  varnish -> apache -> mongrel (rails)

and in front of varnish we have a hardware load-balancer (as a service of our hosting provider, softlayer) which
balances traffic to 3 servers.

In the past, as soon as we took down apache on one of our servers, the load balancer would detect it and route
all traffic to the other servers.

However, since we started running varnish, the load balancer doesn't seem to detect that a server is down, and so
it keeps sending traffic even after varnish has quit.

Has anybody run into any similar problems, or have any ideas why we would see different behavior running Varnish
as opposed to simply Apache?

Thanks,

--Scott Persinger
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