Migrate to the latest marketplace image

Abstract

How to migrate a Posit cloud marketplace virtual machine (VM) to a clean VM from the latest published offer.

Description

This guide covers migrating a cloud marketplace VM (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) to a clean VM from the latest offer. If you don’t need a fresh image, upgrade in place.

Solution

Create a disk snapshot

Before launching the new VM, create a snapshot of the old VM’s disk.

AWS — Create an Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot of the old instance’s root volume:

• Create Amazon EBS snapshots
• Attach an EBS volume to an instance

Google Cloud — Create a persistent disk snapshot of the old VM’s boot disk:

• Create and manage disk snapshots
• Create a disk from a snapshot and attach it to a VM

Azure — Create a snapshot of the old VM’s managed disk:

• Create a snapshot of a managed disk
• Attach a managed disk to a VM

Create a new VM from the latest marketplace offer

Create a new VM from the latest marketplace offer for the product.

Copy user data

Attach the snapshot as a secondary (read-only) disk on the new VM. Do not copy system files, application binaries, or configuration that the marketplace image manages — the new VM already has the correct versions of these. Mount the old disk read-only and copy only user data.

# Identify the device name of the attached old disk (e.g., /dev/xvdf1, /dev/sdb1)
lsblk

# Mount read-only
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/old
sudo mount -o ro /dev/<device> /mnt/old

Copy the directories that contain user-created content. Do not copy system files or application binaries.

Reassign networking

Reassign networking (static IPs, Domain Name System (DNS) records, load balancers, security groups) to the new VM.

Validate and clean up

Validate the new VM is working correctly. After validation:

1. Remove the old disk from the new VM if attached.
2. Keep the snapshot in case you need to recover additional data later.
3. Terminate the old VM.
4. Delete the snapshot once you are confident the migration is complete.

If you’re still having issues, you can reach out to Support by opening a ticket.