Fighting physics: Offshore users (India) connecting to US VDI's. How are you handling latency?
Hey everyone,
Looking for a reality check on offshore VDI performance, specifically regarding the laws of physics.
Our Setup:
- Company: Large, highly regulated enterprise.
- Infrastructure: Citrix Gateway Service with optimized HDX policies for low bandwith.
- VDI Location: mainly US West Coast, some centralus. We try to put them in west coast if we know they are in India but we dont always get that info.
- User Base: Massive offshore contractor workforce (primarily India via Accenture, Wipro, etc.).
The Problem: Management loves this model because it avoids hardware logistics and keeps data in the US. However, the users constantly complain about "VDI slowness." When we dig into the metrics, they are consistently pulling 600ms+ ICA RTT.
To be clear, not everyone from India has that high of RTT, but I would say 350-400ms is pretty standard for these users. The ones that complain are 600+ though.
To make it worse, most of these contractors are using their own firm-issued endpoints, routing through their corporate VPNs or ZTN clients before even hitting our gateway, despite us explicitly telling them this impacts performance.
We constantly get the classic lines: "It’s slower here than at other clients" or "We don't have this issue anywhere else."
I think it's BS. Unless those "other places" are hosting VDI workloads locally in India cloud landing zones or regional datacenters, you cannot bypass the physical distance between India and the US.
My Questions to the Community:
- If you host VDI in the US for offshore users in Asia/India, are you seeing these same astronomical RTT numbers?
- If your latency is actually decent, how are you defeating physics?
- How do you successfully force third-party vendors (Accenture/Wipro) to bypass their internal security stacks/VPNs for the Citrix connection?
Thanks!
EDIT: We have a document we deliver to them about our requirements, including stating that the GWS POP FQDN's need to be excluded from inspection and routed direct. They don't listen, a lot of these IT departments with these firms dont care and or just wont do it but we get blamed for it. All we can do is try to communicate it to our management.