gce_export

Compute Engine Image Export

The gce_export tool streams a local disk to a Google Compute Engine image file in a Google Cloud Storage bucket (steps 9 and 10 in the image export documentation). When exporting to GCS, no local file is created so no additional disk space needs to be allocated. Once complete the image file can be imported in GCE as described in the image import documentation.

This tool can also be used to export the image to local disk.

Build

Download and install Go. Then pull and install the gce_export tool, this should place the binary in the Go bin directory:

go get github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-tools/cli_tools/gce_export

Flags

• -disk disk to export, on linux this would be something like /dev/sdb, and on Windows \\.\PhysicalDrive1
• -buffer_prefix if set will use this local path as the local buffer prefix, on linux this would be something like /my_folder, and on Windows \\.\PhysicalDrive2\path.
• -gcs_path GCS path to upload the image to, in the form of gs://my-bucket/image.tar.gz
• -oauth path to oauth json file for authenticating to the GCS bucket
• -licenses (optional) comma separated list of licenses to add to the image
• -y skip confirmation prompt

Usage

While you can export a disk with currently mounted partitions, or even the disk containing the current root partition it is recommended to unmount all partitions prior to running gce_export.

Linux:

This will stream /dev/sdb to the GCS path gs://some-bucket/linux.tar.gz

gce_export -disk /dev/sdb -gcs_path gs://some-bucket/linux.tar.gz

This will stream /dev/sdb to the local path /my_folder/linux.tar.gz

gce_export -disk /dev/sdb -local_path /my_folder/linux.tar.gz

Windows:

This will stream \\.\PhysicalDrive1 to the GCS path gs://some-bucket/path/windows.tar.gz

gce_export.exe -disk \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -gcs_path gs://some-bucket/windows.tar.gz

This will stream \\.\PhysicalDrive1 to the local path \\.\PhysicalDrive2\path\windows.tar.gz

gce_export.exe -disk \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -local_path \\.\PhysicalDrive2\path\windows.tar.gz