Register a legacy instance with Notebooks API

This page shows how to migrate and register a legacy user-managed notebooks instance with the Notebooks API. Instances created by using the Compute Engine API are called legacy instances. Legacy instances don't have the latest updates to functionality and features.

To use the new functionality and features that are available with the Notebooks API, you must register your legacy instances with the Notebooks API. Before registering your legacy instances, check whether they meet the requirements. You can migrate instances that don't meet the requirements.

If you enable the Notebooks API before registering your legacy instances, the Notebooks API activation process attempts to register your existing legacy instances automatically.

Requirements and limitations

Before registering your legacy instances with the Notebooks API, consider the following requirements and limitations.

Source and destination zones must match and be a valid zone for the Notebooks API.

For example, a legacy user-managed notebooks instance in us-west1-a remains in us-west1-a when it is registered with the Notebooks API. However, a legacy user-managed notebooks instance in us-central1-f won't register with the Notebooks API because us-central1-f isn't a valid zone for the Notebooks API.

To get a list of the valid zones for the Notebooks API notebooks instances, run the following command by using the Google Cloud CLI in your preferred terminal or in Cloud Shell:
```
gcloud notebooks locations list
```
If your legacy instance's zone is not a valid zone for the Notebooks API, you can contact support or your account manager, or you can migrate the legacy instance to a new user-managed notebooks instance.
Only dual-disk instances can use all user-managed notebooks features.

Single-disk legacy instances cannot use some user-managed notebooks features, such as auto upgrade, even after they are registered with the Notebooks API. To enable your single-disk legacy instance to use all available features, you must migrate your single-disk instance to a dual-disk instance.

You can migrate your single-disk instance to a dual-disk instance as part of your migration from a legacy instance to an instance registered with the Notebooks API. If you've already registered the legacy instance with the Notebooks API, you can still migrate the instance to a new dual-disk instance to resolve the issue.

To verify the number of disks, complete the following steps.
Console
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.
  
  Go to VM instances
2. Find your current legacy user-managed notebooks instance.
3. Click the instance name to open the VM instance details page.
4. In the boot disk and additional disks sections, verify how many disks are attached to the VM.
gcloud
1. In Cloud Shell or any environment where the Google Cloud CLI is installed, enter the following Google Cloud CLI command:
```
gcloud compute instances describe MY_INSTANCE_NAME \
    --zone=MY_ZONE
```
  Replace the following:
  - MY_INSTANCE_NAME: the name of your instance
  - MY_ZONE: the zone of your instance
2. Review the information that follows disks:, and verify how many disks are attached to the VM.

Migrate a legacy instance to a new user-managed notebooks instance

If your legacy user-managed notebooks instance is in a zone that isn't a valid zone for the Notebooks API, or if you want to migrate from a single-disk instance to a dual-disk instance, you must create a user-managed notebooks instance and copy your user data from your legacy instance to the new instance.

To create a user-managed notebooks instance and copy your user data from your legacy instance to the new instance, complete the following steps:

To use ssh to connect to your legacy instance, in Cloud Shell or any environment where the Google Cloud CLI is installed, enter the following Google Cloud CLI command:
```
export PROJECT_ID="MY_PROJECT_ID"
export ZONE="MY_ZONE"
export INSTANCE_NAME="MY_INSTANCE"
gcloud compute ssh \
    --project $PROJECT_ID \
    --zone $ZONE $INSTANCE_NAME \
    -- -L 8080:localhost:8080
```
Replace the following:
- MY_PROJECT_ID: the ID of your Google Cloud project
- MY_ZONE: the zone of your instance
- MY_INSTANCE: the name of your instance with the relevant information.
To copy the contents of the legacy instance to a Cloud Storage bucket, use gcloud storage. The following example command copies all of the notebook (.ipynb) files from the default directory /home/jupyter/ to a Cloud Storage directory named my-bucket/legacy-notebooks.
```
gcloud storage cp /home/jupyter/*.ipynb gs://my-bucket/legacy-notebooks/ --recursive
```
Create a user-managed notebooks instance with the same hardware specifications as the legacy instance. You can create the instance by using the Google Cloud console or the Google Cloud CLI.

In this example, Vertex AI Workbench creates a user-managed notebooks instance named new-notebook in the example project using the latest TensorFlow 2 image, with an n1-standard-1 machine type, in the us-west1-a zone.

In either Cloud Shell or any environment where the Google Cloud CLI is installed, enter the following Google Cloud CLI command:
```
gcloud notebooks instances create new-notebook \
    --vm-image-project=example \
    --vm-image-family=tf-latest-cpu \
    --machine-type=n1-standard-1 \
    --location=us-west1-a
```
The new user-managed notebooks instance is dual-disk. It has a boot disk and a data disk.
Use ssh to connect to the user-managed notebooks instance that you just created.
To copy the contents of the legacy instance from the Cloud Storage bucket to the new instance, use gcloud storage. The following example command copies all of the notebook (.ipynb) files from the Cloud Storage directory to the new instance's /home/jupyter/ directory.
```
gcloud storage cp gs://my-bucket/legacy-notebooks/*.ipynb  /home/jupyter/ --recursive
```
In the new user-managed notebooks instance, open JupyterLab and confirm that the user data and assets have been successfully copied.
Optional: delete the legacy instance.

Register a legacy instance with the Notebooks API

To use the Notebooks API to manage your legacy instances, you must register your legacy instances with the Notebooks API.

If you enable the Notebooks API before registering your legacy instances, the Notebooks API activation process attempts to register your existing legacy instances automatically. If you create legacy instances after the Notebooks API is enabled, you must register them manually by using one of the following methods.

To register your legacy instance with the Notebooks API, you can use the Google Cloud console or the Notebooks API.

Console

To use the Register all option in the Google Cloud console, complete the following steps:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the User-managed notebooks page.

Go to User-managed notebooks
If you have one or more legacy user-managed notebooks instances, a message appears indicating that you need to register them with the Notebooks API. Next to this message, click Register all.
If you do not have any legacy user-managed notebooks instances, but have not yet enabled the Notebooks API, click Enable Notebooks API to ensure that new user-managed notebooks instances are created by using the Notebooks API.

Notebooks API

To use the register method provided by the Notebooks API, in Cloud Shell or any environment where the Google Cloud CLI is installed, enter the following Google Cloud CLI command:

gcloud notebooks instances register MY_INSTANCE_NAME \
    --location=MY_ZONE

Replace the following:

MY_INSTANCE_NAME: the name of your instance
MY_ZONE: the zone of your instance

What's next

Create a user-managed notebooks instance by using a custom container