The following information has been gleaned from F5 web articles and should be taken as recommendations only. Local F5 administrators should be the first source of recommendations, but at least the basics are available here.
The servers are each defined as a "node" in a server pool -- here is a good article on understanding an F5 Load balancing
Load Balancing 101: Nuts and Bolts
The FVTerm Inventu Viewer+ web application provides a URL to call for live information on the health of the server. For an F5 HTTP monitor, the request line will resemble something like the following:
GET /FVTerm/FVHealth.aspx HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: host.domain.com\r\nConnection: Close\r\n
If the server is offline, then the response will be --no response-- and this would obviously be the worst health!
The other responses include the following three possible text strings:
•ACTIVE - nnn Sessions Available
This is for a healthy server and will provide the number of sessions available
•ON HOLD
This server is on hold, and will not accept any new connection requests to a host
•ALL SESSIONS IN USE
All sessions are in-use on this server
Simply looking for the string "ACTIVE" should well to distribute requests to healthy servers.
In short--configure a unique FVTerm oriented Cookie persistence, and select "HTTP Cookie Insert" as the type of Cookie, and instead of an expiration time, select "Session Cookie". For more details, see: K83419154: Overview of cookie persistence