Wanted: suggestions for speeding up the airlock review process

[TonyWildish-BH]

The airlock review process requires the reviewer to boot up a Windows VM, then RDP into it to check the data. This is currently a very slow process, taking about 15 minutes or more from clicking the button to create the review VM to being able to look at the data. This is enough to be burdensome, so I'd be very much interested to hear ideas about how to improve the speed of this process.

Some possibilities I can think of are:

1. Use a custom VM with stripped down post-boot installation, so it doesn't do much other than just boot.
2. Use a (custom) Linux VM, which normally boot much faster
3. Create the VM at the time the request is submitted, let it do the slow stuff while waiting for the reviewer to turn up. That's not too expensive if the machine is small enough, but given that a lot of stuff happens on first-login, not just first boot, this may not help much.

Does anyone else have any ideas how to speed this part up? Any thoughts on the difficulty of implementing these options?

[West-P]

The template used for the import and export review VMs can be customised/changed. You don't have to use the template on offer in the vanilla repo. If you were to use, as you say, a linux VM instead, maybe use a windows image that is more lightweight, that can be configured using the YAML templates which can be seen in the User Resource section of the Guacamole Workspace Service.

There are examples of both a Windows and Linux VM template in the current AzureTRE repo.

[marrobi]

You could look to use Linux containers (with UI), that would be faster. We have had discussions around the same VM being reused for all reviews, but not sure that is compliant for all use cases.