The answer is yes and no. In most scenerios it will remain sticky, however if a user is logged into an application and the server that they are sent to goes down or becomes unavailable they will be sent to another server in the farm. This situation should be rare, but might occur. I would think the user would get an error and they would have to start a new session at that point. An issue is going to exist no matter if you use a purely sticky solution or this one. The only difference maybe in how your application handles being transfered to a different sever in the farm instead of the connection just going away like in a traditional sticky solution. I have include the exact language for your information below.
HTH
g
According to http://siag.nu/pen/
The load balancing algorithm keeps track of clients and will try to send them back to the server they visited the last time. The client table has a number of slots (default 2048, settable through command-line arguments). When the table is full, the least recently used one will be thrown out to make room for the new one.
This is superior to a simple round-robin algorithm, which sends a client that connects repeatedly to different servers. Doing so breaks applications that maintain state between connections in the server, including most modern web applications.
When pen detects that a server is unavailable, it scans for another starting with the server after the most recently used one. That way we get load balancing and "fair" failover for free.
Correctly configured, pen can ensure that a server farm is always available, even when individual servers are brought down for maintenance or reconfiguration. The final single point of failure, pen itself, can be eliminated by running pen on several servers, using vrrp to decide which is active.
