Multi-Region Deployments in GCP

Learn more about multi-region infrastructure in GCP

Reisbel Machado avatar
Written by Reisbel Machado
Updated over a week ago

Companies with multiple sites located in different states, countries or continents can now be deployed under single domain with their environment created close to their physical location.

Advantages of multi-region deployments

Low latency - getting servers closer to users provides a great end user experience when it comes to speed and performance.
Additionally, the environment will provide better performance when connecting from other locations as well. The way it works is that the user can download an RDP file that is pre-configured for every location. If connected from a different location, the user will be automatically redirected to the gateway server that's closest to user's current location and the gateway will then forward the connection to user's default broker/ session host. 

For example: A company has 2 locations: London and Virginia, created with multi region deployment. A user created in London environment travels to US and wants to connect to his virtual desktop. User will download an RDP file for US region and the connection will be automatically redirected to US region gateway. Then, already inside the Google network it will forward the connection to user's default broker/ session host server located in London.

Centralized domain - all sites are created under a single domain that is able to replicate AD changes across all sites


Environment Configuration Details

Example infrastructure:

A full environment with domain controller, session hosts, gateway and file server is created in each site. 

The environment will have a Google Regional load balancer on each region, all working off the 1 Static IP. The connections will hit the load balancer and it runs a quick health check to make sure all gateway's are working properly and round robins the connection request to the gateway for the region of the user. Then the gateway will forward the request to the broker which then decides the session host to send the user to.  

Connectivity in Google Sites

All sites in the Google cloud are interconnected by default regardless of region. This is because of the default network created for each project and the default routes. Google cloud creates a 10.128.0.0/9 subnet and breaks it up into smaller /20 subnets for each region and creates a route allowing all communication between the larger /9 networks.

Sites and subnets 

Each site will have a network automatically created by Google depending on the region selected. That network will also serve as the AD Replication subnet for that site.

Replication sites

Each site/region will replicate to the other AD sites to ensure that any changes made in any site are known to the entire domain.

Replication subnets

With each site being deployed in a different region, replication subnets are created based on the subnet belonging to that region. Each replication site is automatically placed within it's corresponding replication subnet.

Site links

All sites will have site links created between them and each link will have a cost associated with it which will be based on the latency between each region. The cost for each link is automatically calculated during deployment.

RDP files

Users can select the site when downloading the RDP file and if connecting from a different site than user's default one, the RDP file is already configured to redirect to the closest broker that is then able to forward the connection to user's default site optimizing the latency to minimum.

Filesystem & user profiles

Files, folders, as well as user profiles are located on the file server in user's default location.


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