Patent ID: 8560695

Claim:
A method for an appliance to direct requests of a first virtual server managing a first plurality of services to a second virtual server upon determining a health of the first virtual server falls below a health threshold, the method comprising the steps of: (a) identifying, via an appliance, a health threshold for a first virtual server, the first virtual server directing requests from a plurality of clients to a plurality of services, the health threshold comprising a percentage; (b) monitoring, by the appliance, a status of each of the plurality of services to determine whether each service has the status of up or down, each of the plurality of services bound to the first virtual server via a configuration of the first virtual server on the appliance, each of the plurality of services assigned a weight and having a configuration identified as enabled in the configuration of the first virtual server on the appliance, at least one of the plurality of services identified as up from monitoring has a configuration identified as disabled in the configuration of the first virtual server; (c) establishing, by the appliance, a health for the plurality of services by summing weights of each of the plurality services identified via monitoring as up and dividing the summed weights by a sum of weights of each of the plurality of services having configuration identified as enabled in the configuration of the first virtual server and up and each of the plurality of services having configuration identified as enabled in the configuration of the first virtual server and down; and (d) determining, by the appliance, that the health falls below the health threshold and responsive to the determination, using a second virtual server for directing the requests from the plurality of clients to a second plurality of services.