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Transferring VMs between folders or clouds

Written by
Updated at May 5, 2025

Issue description

You need to transfer a VM instance from one cloud or folder to another cloud or folder.

Solution

To transfer a VM between clouds, complete the following steps:

  1. Create an image from the disk of the required VM
  2. Add an IAM user to the cloud with the image you want to transfer;
  3. Assign the IAM user the minimum required roles of resource-manager.clouds.member and compute.images.user.
  4. Set up the YC CLI tool for the user in the target cloud.
  5. Get the ID of your image. For this, in the web interface, find the ID field in the Images tab, or get the ID using the YC CLI yc compute image list command.
  6. Get the ID of the cloud where the original image is located. For this, in the web interface, find the ID field on the cloud's home page, or get the ID using the YC CLI yc resource-manager cloud list command.
  7. Create a new image in the target cloud using the YC CLI tool:
yc compute image create --name <new_image_name> \
--source-image-id <ID_of_original_image> \
--cloud-id <ID_of_cloud_where_original_image_is_located>

After performing these actions, create a new VM instance from the resulting image.

To change the folder of a VM instance, complete the following steps:

  • In the CLI:

    If you do not have the Yandex Cloud CLI yet, install and initialize it.

    The folder specified when creating the CLI profile is used by default. To change the default folder, use the yc config set folder-id <folder_ID> command. You can specify a different folder using the --folder-name or --folder-id parameter.

    1. Get a list of all VMs in the default folder:

      yc compute instance list

      Result:

      +----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
|          ID          |       NAME      |    ZONE ID    | STATUS  |     DESCRIPTION      |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
| fhm0b28lgfp4tkoa3jl6 | first-instance  | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my first vm via CLI  |
| fhm9gk85nj7gcoji2f8s | second-instance | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my second vm via CLI |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+

    2. Get a list of all folders in the default cloud:

      yc resource-manager folder list

      Result:

      +----------------------+--------------------+------------------+--------+
|          ID          |        NAME        |      LABELS      | STATUS |
+----------------------+--------------------+------------------+--------+
| b1gd129pp9ha0vnvf5g7 | my-folder          |                  | ACTIVE |
| b1g66mft1vopnevbn57j | default            |                  | ACTIVE |
+----------------------+--------------------+------------------+--------+

    3. View the description of the CLI command for moving a VM:

      yc compute instance move --help

    4. Move the VM to another folder with the following parameters:

      • In id, enter the ID of the VM, for example, fhm0b28lgfp4tkoa3jl6.
      • In destination-folder-id, enter the ID of the destination folder, for example, b1gd129pp9ha0vnvf5g7.
      yc compute instance move \
    --id fhm0b28lgfp4tkoa3jl6 \
    --destination-folder-id b1gd129pp9ha0vnvf5g7

      For more information about the yc compute instance move command, see the CLI reference.

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