Configuring the WSM using Device Manager

Virtual hosting

Web OS lets individuals and companies have a presence on the Internet in the form of a dedicated Web site address. For example, you can have a www.site-a.com and www.site-b.com instead of www.hostsite.com/site-a and www.hostsite.com/site-b. Service providers, on the other hand, do not want to deplete the pool of unique IP addresses by dedicating an individual IP address for each home page they host. By supporting an extension in HTTP 1.1 to include the host header, Web OS enables service providers to create a single virtual server IP address to host multiple Web sites per customer, each with their own host name.

Note: For SLB, one HTTP header is supported per virtual server.

With virtual hosting:

An HTTP/1.0 request sent to an origin server (not a proxy server) is a partial URL instead of a full URL.

An example of the request that the origin server would see as follows:

GET /products/180/ HTTP/1.0
User-agent: Mozilla/3.0
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg

The GET request does not include the host name. From the TCP/IP headers, the origin server knows the requests host name, port number, and protocol.

With the extension to HTTP/1.1 to include the HTTP HOST: header, the above request to retrieve the URL /www.nortelnetworks.com/ products/180 would look like this:

GET /products/180/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nortelnetworks.com
User-agent: Mozilla/3.0
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg

The Host: header carries the hostname used to generate the IP address of the site.

Based on the Host: header, the WSM will forward the request to servers representing different customers' Web sites.
You must define a domain name as part of the 128 supported URL strings.
The WSM performs string matching; that is, the string nortelnetworks.com or www.nortelnetworks.com will match www.nortelnetworks.com.