Redirection and DNS Masking

I am having problems implementing an iRule to solve the following situation:

Customer has 2 sites; a.b.com and y.z.com. Both sites are hosted on the F5 and have functioning VIPs. We are trying to redirect a URI string of http://a.b.com/apply to https://y.z.com, while maintaining the a.b.com/apply host name.

So far this is what I have done.

On a.b.com I have applied an irule(Rule 1) that redirects traffic to https://a.b.com/abc/common/Pages/welcome.aspx. if the URI matches "/apply"

On the https://a.b.com VIP i have applied a rule(Rule 2) that says if the URI matches "/abc/common" use pool y.z.com. Rule 1 is working fine, the redirection happens no problem. Rule 2 is throwing a connection was reset in the browser. I am at a loss here any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason

Rule 1:

when HTTP_REQUEST {

if {

[string tolower [HTTP::uri]] starts_with "/apply"} {

HTTP::redirect "https://a.b.com/abc/Pages/welcome.aspx" }

}

Rule 2:

when HTTP_REQUEST {

if {

[string tolower [HTTP::uri]] starts_with "/abc/common/" } {

pool y.z.com

}

}