Custom Response Header For Our TFS 2010 App Tier Farm

I’m curious to see if people think this is a good idea or not. In our TFS 2010 farm we have four application servers. In the process of testing load balancing and fail over, I was having trouble trying to figure out which box my requests were going to. Our load balancer sets a cookie so we persist to the same App Tier machine, but it’s an obfuscated value that no one seems to be able to provide any insight into how to un-obfuscate it. (And I’m not sure if devenv.exe is passing that cookie as we seem to be bouncing across all four App Tiers when doing things like “Get.” Not a big deal, but it would be nice if there was a way to persist.)

To help me out, I set a custom response header called “x-tfs-machine” that resolves the name of the App Tier machine. Via Fiddler or Wireshark, I know can inspect what App Tier I’m hitting. It seems to be working quite well for me.

While I’m just using this for testing, I’m thinking about leaving it on when we go live so we can see what server a user is hitting if they are running into issues.