Appendix: SAP Load Balancing Protocol Specification 

Implementation Considerations

SAP offers its SAP Web Dispatcher program as an out-of-the-box solution for HTTP/HTTPS  load balancing in SAP Web Application Server landscapes.

In order to enable basic load balancing also with third party (hardware) web switches, it is the intention of this documentation to reveal the detailed specification of SAP’s basic load balancing protocol (for stateless request routing) as well as session identifier syntax (for stateful requests)   

Note that certain aspects of the complex SAP request routing logic such as the between URLs and SAP Logon Groups cannot be simply mapped onto a standard web switch configuration.

Therefore, this paper will focus on the basic load balancing (stateless HTTP requests) and session identifiers (stateful HTTP), excluding the URL-to-SAP Logon Group mapping.