Shelving & Unshelving Resources

Owned by Mengsi Wells-Lakeland
Last updated: Sept 07, 2024 by Lauren
2 min read

A great way to free up capacity without losing your computing instance

Shelving

Shelving is when you temporarily suspend an instance to release cloud resources (vCPU, GPU and RAM) for other researchers to use. It's great for when you don't need to actively use your instance for a while, but may still need it again in the future. Unlike deleting your instance, shelving saves your current instance state, preserving its volume storage. This means you can always quickly reactivate it whenever you need it again (unshelving). When users shelve their idle instances, it helps us protect capacity and allocate resources fairly and efficiently across the research community, keeping the service available to everyone.

Unshelving

Unshelving is when you unsuspend a shelved instance, reactivating it and loading it back to the state it was in before it was shelved. An unshelved instance relaunches with all your previous saved data.

Auto-shelving

Auto-shelving is when the system shelves an instance because it has not been logged into (via FastX, SSH or Microsoft Remote Desktop) for a long time. We set the Portal to auto-shelve instances when they've been idle for 90 consecutive days, but we'll always give you plenty of warning:

After 45 inactive days

  • notifications are sent to your email and your 'Notifications' page in RCP

  • inactivity prompts/auto-shelving warnings are displayed on your Home page in RCP

After 75 inactive days

  • reminder notifications are sent to your email and your 'Notifications' page in RCP

After 90 inactive days

  • the instance is auto-shelved and a confirmation is sent to your email and your 'Notifications' page in RCP

To stop a warned auto-shelving just log into your instance via your usual remote desktop application, or find the instance on your RCP Home page and click on its 'Yes, Im still using this' button.

resource_card_idle_options.png

Important ramifications

Shelving and auto-shelving:

  • Preserves volume data but NOT unsaved data.

  • STOPS any running processes and applications.

Unshelving:

  • REPLACES IP ADDRESSES on instances, potentially impacting your system if it relies on IP addresses for network communication with other machines.

RCP resources featuring shelve/unshelve functions

  • Researcher Desktop

  • Research Server

How to shelve/unshelve in RCP

  1. Start from your Home page (and make sure you're in the relevant Activity view to see the particular instance that you want to manage).

  2. Locate the tile relating to the instance.

  3. On the tile, press the 'Options' button (the one to the right of the 'Open' button) to go to the Options page.

    resource_card_options.png

  4. On the Options page, click either the ‘Shelve’ or ‘Unshelve’ buttons depending on your need.