search

microsoft / AzureTRE

An accelerator to help organizations build Trusted Research Environments on Azure.
https://microsoft.github.io/AzureTRE
MIT License
169 stars 133 forks source link

for Guacamole VMs, the 'Stop' and 'Disable' button semantics are not clear. #3973

Open TonyWildish-BH opened 3 weeks ago

TonyWildish-BH commented 3 weeks ago

Describe the bug A VM in Guacamole can be disabled with the 'Stop' button from the 'Actions' menu, or with the 'Disable' button, Both appear to do the same thing, from the viewpoint of the TRE interface, in that they show the VM in the same state, and it's no longer possible to connect to it.

However, the 'Disable' button leaves the VM running, as seen in the Azure portal. This is misleading, I would expect that disabling the VM would shut it down and deallocate it.

Similarly, just for fun, if I shut down the VM in the Azure portal, the TRE portal reflects this status when I refresh, but the 'Enable' button doesn't seem to do anything at all. In short, the Enable and Disable buttons seem to serve no purpose for VMs.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a VM via Guacamole
  2. Disable it via the TRE
  3. Note that it's still running in the Azure portal.

N.B. it would be nice to at least have meaningful tooltips for the Update/Disable/Enable buttons, that would go some way to avoiding potentially costly mistakes.

Azure TRE release version (e.g. v0.14.0 or main):

Deployed Azure TRE components - click the (i) in the UI: UI Version: 0.5.21 API Version: 0.18.5

SvenAelterman commented 1 week ago

@TonyWildish-BH Thanks for the feedback. The purpose of the Enable/Disable buttons is the same across all Azure TRE services, which is to prevent the service from being used and is the first step before deleting a service.

On VMs, the Stop action is, as you've observed, the deallocated the VM and is therefore an operation performed to interact with the VM state, e.g., to reduce costs by not having VMs running all the time.

Hope this clarifies.