I have 6 ArcServers participating in 1 site that I am deploying. I have setup the IIS webadaptor on 2 machines that are being load balanced behind an F5. Do I need the webadaptor? All the webadaptor does is forward traffic from port 443 to 6443. It also does a little load balancing (maybe).
With the F5, I can do SSL offloading at the hardware level (much more efficient). I can decrypt once at the F5 instead of having to decrypt at IIS, then re-encrypt to pass on to ArcGIS to un-encrypt and have to do it all again on the return. I don't have to have IIS do any URL routing like the web-adaptor does. All traffic to that particular subdomain will be forwarded to the ArcGIS Server site.
The way I see it, you are using IIS as a router/load balancer. If I have access to the real thing, it will be much more efficient and I don't see that I lose anything.
What am I missing? And has anybody already done this?