Upgrade in-place from LTS to Pro¶

If your production environment is based on Ubuntu LTS and you need the premium security, support or compliance features of Ubuntu Pro, you don’t have to migrate your applications to new Ubuntu Pro VMs. You can just perform an in-place upgrade of your existing machines in three simple steps:

Stop your machine:

gcloud compute instances stop $INSTANCE_NAME

Update the license on the disk to Ubuntu Pro:

gcloud compute disks update $INSTANCE_NAME --zone=$ZONE \
    --replace-license=$PREVIOUS_LICENSE_URI,$NEW_LICENSE_URI

where

$INSTANCE_NAME is the name of the instance to replace the license on;
$ZONE is the zone containing the instance;
$PREVIOUS_LICENSE_URI is the license URI for the non-Pro version on your VM; and
$NEW_LICENSE_URI is the license URI for the Pro version that you are upgrading to.

You can only update to Pro for the same Ubuntu series. If your VM runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, you need to upgrade to Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS.

For $PREVIOUS_LICENSE_URI choose the appropriate URI from:

Version	License URI
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-1604-lts`
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-1804-lts`
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-2004-lts`
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-2204-lts`
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-2404-lts`

For $NEW_LICENSE_URI choose the appropriate URI from:

Version	License URI
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-pro-1604-lts`
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-pro-1804-lts`
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-pro-2004-lts`
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-pro-2204-lts`
Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS	`https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-pro-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-pro-2404-lts`

Start the machine:

gcloud compute instances start $INSTANCE_NAME

SSH into your machine and verify the upgrade by running:

pro status

The output should show the different services available and their current status. Something like:

SERVICE          ENTITLED  STATUS    DESCRIPTION
anbox-cloud      yes       disabled  Scalable Andriod in the cloud
esm-apps         yes       enabled   Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications
esm-infra        yes       enabled   Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure
fips-preview     yes       disabled  Preview of FIPS crypto packages undergoing certification with NIST
fips-updates     yes       disabled  FIPS compliant crypto packages with stable security updates
livepatch        yes       enabled   Canonical Livepatch service
usg              yes       disabled  Security compliance and audit tools

For comprehensive instructions, please refer to the official Google Cloud documentation for upgrading to Pro.