How to determine which Citrix POP location for users accessing Cloud Apps and Desktop?

[Marc Davies]

We have a Citrix Cloud environment with VDAs running in Azure (multiple locations - East, Central, West). Each Azure location has VDAs, Cloud Connectors, and domain controllers. Each Azure location has it's own resource location in Citrix Cloud and using Gateway Service.

 

Is it possible to determine how users are being routed for gateway services (which Citrix POP they go through)? We have west coast users accessing the west coast VDA with latency equal to what they get when accessing central US VDAs. It almost seems like they are being routed to a non-optimal Citrix POP to connect. I can ping the VDA from my laptop and get 10-20ms. I can ping the closest Citrix POP location and get 35-40ms. But my user sessions are are showing 100+ms in their session details.

[Koenraad Willems]

Hi,

 

Do the users access resources that are dedicated to a specific locations (East, Central, West), or do these exist on all locations?

 

ICA RTT can get high sometimes, it depends on a lot of parameters, like server load, specific application used, jitter on the network path, ...

 

Best,

 

Koenraad

[Marc Davies]

Hi Koenraad,

Thanks for the reply. Each site has all of it's own file servers that users access. They do not have any need to access resources outside of the West datacenter.

 

As for ICA RTT - this has been tested with only 1 user connected and whether they have notepad or file explorer or a demanding app, it is the same.

 

I have attached images for comparison from Director. This is a comparison for the user close to the datacenter (West US 2 image) and the same user while accessing the South Central datacenter (this location is 2,000 miles away). For the West user, this is in Seattle - The Azure West datacenter is in Washington state and the nearest Citrix POP is AWS West (Oregon). I would assume some latency - I get approx 30-40ms response from AWS Oregon pop and approx 10-15ms to Azure - but this seems EXTREMELY high when compared to the other datacenter.

[Koenraad Willems]

Hi,

 

Looks indeed like the traffic is not being routed through to closest POP, or there is significant latency on that path. To be quite honest, that ICA RTT is what you would see if you connected from West Coast to somewhere in Europe.

You might be able to deduct what POP is used, by checking the ICA file that is generated, it should have the Gateway's IP in there. Then ping that IP to see what kind of latency you are getting.
 

The Citrix Gateway service in Citrix Cloud should do the optimal HDX routing automatically by selecting the nearest POP, but you have no control over it:

https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-gateway-service.html

 

Best,

 

Koenraad