Google application displays content from a different region when accessed using VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud.

Products

• VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud

Issue/Introduction

This article will outline the reasons an incorrect site geolocation may occur when using Google applications and the different solutions that a network engineer may use to overcome the problem.

Symptoms:

A Google application, such as YouTube, Google Search, Maps, Gmail etc. uses a region different from the user’s actual location. Example: a user in the northwest United States is streaming YouTube content. The user is behind a VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud powered network, their traffic traversing a VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud Gateway located in the Greater Seattle Area and uses a US public IP address.  However, the user notices that the YouTube location is Canada, and not the expected US.

Environment

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud

Cause

In order to understand why a service such as Google may load content from a region different from the user’s location, we need to understand how these applications deliver data based on the location of the user.

Google maintains a Geo IP database which is updated whenever a client uses a Google application. Many users utilize a smart phone with GPS and connection to a cellular network, and Google can track where those users are located and update their Geo IP database accordingly to show the content for that country. This can be an issue when a VeloCloud Gateway is located near a national border such as Canada.  VeloCloud Gateways are multi-tenant—meaning numerous customers and their client users are connecting out to the web using a single Gateway.  

Going back to our example, all these clients may be using the Seattle-based VeloCloud Gateway, but many of those clients are in Vancouver, Canada.  Consider a VeloCloud client user in Vancouver who using a smartphone and is connected to a VMware SD-WAN Edge.  When that user connects to a Google application, Google's geolocation mechanism will detect that the traffic is sourcing from Canada and update its Geo IP database to reflect that the IP for the Seattle Gateway is in fact located in Canada. Google will then adjust the content delivered to the customers connected to this Gateway to reflect this new geolocation.  

Resolution

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud customers should expect that sending traffic through a VeloCloud Gateway may result in inaccurate geolocation for Google applications—especially when customers are located near a national border. VeloCloud cannot control Google’s method of establishing geolocation for our Gateway IP’s and previous efforts to engage Google on this matter have not been productive. 

There are several ways to work around this issue: 
•    The most common workaround is to configure a business policy to send a Google application Direct instead of going through the VeloCloud Gateway.  You may need to configure multiple rules to account for all affected Google applications.

Sending traffic Direct means that Google will see the source IP as the Local ISP.  Local ISPs do not suffer from Google geolocation issues the way a multi-tenant/single IP service such as VMware SD-WAN using a Gateway would.
Note: You will need to run Remote Diagnostics->Flush Flows to ensure the rule applies immediately to all traffic.
•    Backhaul traffic to a hub that does not use the affected Gateway; or change the Gateway assignment by modifying the gateway pool. There are two potential drawbacks with this workaround: first the alternate hub or Gateway may increase latency for this customer; second the alternate Gateway may manifest the same behavior seen with the current Gateway.
•    Ask users to select their default region for the specific Google application. The drawback here is that this requires each user to manually configure settings versus a more global solution.