LTM Policy - LB does still use a policy rule with an forward to pool action when all pool members are down

Hi Christopher,

the LTM policy based pool selection will not care about the availability of the pool. It would just select the pool as specified by you policy and also won't skip any rules.

But your requirement can be solved by using the Priority Group & Priority Group Activation features.

https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-concepts-11-1-0/ltm_pools.html1216212

Simply add each of your nodes to each of your pools and then increase the priority of the "default" node. In this case the request will be only send to the default node. And if this node is marked down, then the remaining pool will be used as fallback.

Note: In a best-match/first-match strategy you don't need to exclude the already processed URI (see your Rule 4). Just let the rule order or best-match engine do their work...

Cheers, Kai