[geeks] SSL virtual hosting with nginx, Cisco CSS or other load balancer?

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

I am working with a case where I want to be able to SSLify everything
with a wildcard SSL certificate on a load balancer, but then be able to
dispatch to different backend servers based on the now-decrypted hostname.

I am told that Cisco CSS load balancers and SSL proxies can do this, can
the BigIP or even Nginx running on Linux do this also?

e.g.

*.patrick.com wildcard SSL cert installed on frontend lb (load balancer)

request for https://blog.patrick.com goes to lb, but on the backend it
goes to a different internal IP than a request for
https://corporate.patrick.com .  Request from client to frontend lb is
SSL; request from lb to internal servers is straight HTTP.

ISTR some on this list being gurus with Cisco or BigIP or Force5 or
whatnot ...

--Patrick