Clone a workstation

You can quickly clone the content of an existing workstation when creating a new workstation. This can be helpful in certain cases when the region of the source workstation is experiencing instability.

Before you begin

Before you clone a workstation, make sure you have the right permissions to the source workstation:

  1. You must have workstations.workstations.use permission on the source workstation.
  2. The Cloud Workstations Service Agent for the project where you are creating the new workstation must have compute.disks.createSnapshot and compute.snapshots.useReadOnly on the project containing the source workstation.

Clone a workstation

To clone a workstation, create a new workstation and specify the source workstation to copy files from:

    gcloud workstations create WORKSTATION \
      --project=PROJECT \
      --region=REGION \
      --cluster=CLUSTER_NAME \
      --config=CONFIG_NAME \
      --source-workstation=SOURCE_WORKSTATION

Replace the following:

  • WORKSTATION: the ID or fully qualified identifier for the new workstation

  • PROJECT: the project that will contain the new workstation

  • REGION: the region where the new workstation will reside—for example, us-central1

  • CLUSTER_NAME: the name of the workstation cluster that will contain the new workstation

  • CONFIG_NAME: the name of the workstation configuration that will contain the new workstation

  • SOURCE_WORKSTATION: the fully qualified identifier of the source workstation from which the new workstation's persistent directories will be copied

    Your source workstation's identifier might be similar to the following:

    projects/SOURCE_PROJECT/locations/SOURCE_REGION/workstationClusters/SOURCE_CLUSTER/workstationConfigs/SOURCE_CONFIG/workstations/SOURCE_WORKSTATION

    Replace the following:

    • SOURCE_PROJECT: the project containing the source workstation
    • SOURCE_REGION: the location where the source workstation resides
    • SOURCE_CLUSTER: the name of the workstation cluster that contains the source workstation
    • SOURCE_CONFIG: the name of the workstation configuration that contains the source workstation
    • SOURCE_WORKSTATION: the ID of the source workstation

For more information, see gcloud workstations create.

For API reference information, see REST, and RPC.

Copy a workstation's files to a new workstation with a larger disk

When you clone a workstation, the new workstation retains the size of the source disk. If you need more storage, you can copy a workstation's files to a new workstation with a larger disk:

  1. Create a new destination workstation using a configuration that specifies a larger persistent disk.

  2. Start both the source workstation and the destination workstation.

  3. Access a terminal on the destination workstation by launching it in the Google Cloud console or connecting to it using SSH.

  4. From the terminal on the destination workstation, create a TCP tunnel to the source workstation using gcloud workstations start-tcp-tunnel.

    gcloud workstations start-tcp-tunnel \
  --project=SOURCE_PROJECT \
  --region=SOURCE_REGION \
  --cluster=SOURCE_CLUSTER \
  --config=SOURCE_CONFIG \
  SOURCE_WORKSTATION \
  WORKSTATION_PORT \
  --local-host-port=:LOCAL_PORT

    Replace the following:

    • WORKSTATION_PORT: the port on the source workstation to which traffic should be sent (default: 22).
    • LOCAL_PORT (Optional): the localhost port from which traffic will be sent. Valid port numbers are 1024 to 65535. If you omit the --local-host-port flag or specify a port of 0 an unused port is selected automatically.

    When the tunnel is ready it will display the port number:

    Listening on port [LOCAL_PORT].

  5. In another terminal on the destination workstation, run scp and specify the port where the TCP tunnel is listening to copy the files from the source workstation.

    scp -rP LOCAL_PORT \
    user@localhost:~/SOURCE_DIRECTORY \
    ~/DESTINATION_DIRECTORY

    Replace the following:

    • SOURCE_DIRECTORY: the path to the directory to copy from the source workstation
    • DESTINATION_DIRECTORY: the path to the destination directory on the new workstation