Transferring GCE VM from One Project to Another • Ruban Selvarajah

Bad news, you can’t (as of Nov 2024). But you can kinda achieve something similar by copying the VM instead, using native GCP toolkit.

Below I’ve documented how I shifted my Moodle VM, moodlest-moodle from ruban-moodle-cluster to client-dev-cluster via Google Cloud SDK in my PC.

Let’s 🚀

Step 1: Stop the Instance

gcloud compute instances stop moodlest-moodle --zone=asia-southeast1-b

Step 2: Create Snapshot

# Grab datetime first
date +"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S" | xclip -sel clip

gcloud compute snapshots create moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 \
    --source-disk moodlest-moodle \
    --snapshot-type STANDARD \
    --source-disk-zone asia-southeast1-b

Step 3: Create Image

    gcloud compute images create moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 \
    --source-snapshot=moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 \
    --storage-location=asia-southeast1

Step 4: Create VM in Project 2

gcloud compute instances create moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 \
    --project client-dev-cluster \
    --zone asia-southeast1-b \
    --image-project ruban-moodle-cluster \
    --image moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 --subnet projects/client-dev-server-cluster/regions/asia-southeast1/subnetworks/default

Step 5: Clean Up

After verifying that the VM works as expected in the new project, you can delete the image and snapshot from the old project to avoid unnecessary costs.

gcloud compute images delete moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 --project=ruban-moodle-cluster
gcloud compute snapshots delete moodlest-moodle-image-20241108-071735 --project=ruban-moodle-cluster

And that’s a wrap

Now we just wait for Google to add native support for this feature

via GIPHY