Upgrading OS on GCP Compute Engine VM

Solution 1:

You can perform a full inplace OS upgrade but it's not recommended. If for example there's a need to confirm anything during the reboot process you won't be able to do it remotely. You may try to use serial console interaction but it's always a risk.

It's best to clone the VM an try the upgrade on the copy first.

For the test purposes I've tested upgrading from Debian 9 Stretch to Debian 10 Buster. Here's how:

First I've created a new GCP instance running Debian 9 (default settings); then I logged in via SSH and ran fallowing commands:

First I've changed /etc/apt/sources.list all stretch to buster occurences (necessary to go from 9 to 10) with sudo sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

and next ran:

• lsb_release -a - check current OS version

Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 9.13 (stretch)
Release:        9.13
Codename:       stretch

• sudo apt update
• sudo apt upgrade -y
• lsb_release -a - verify after upgrade

If everything's OK you should see:

me@d9:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
Release:        10
Codename:       buster

I was able to SSH into my instance using GCP console with no issues. As you can see I've used just "apt upgrade" since it will just upgrade installed packages. You can check the difference between upgrade vs dist-upgrade in this answer.

I can't say if it's possible with Red Hat or CentOS but I can make and educated guess and say it's possible in the same way as with Debian.