In our previous posts, we briefly explored some basics of vdisk management on AHV via Acropolis cli (acli). You can explore further namespaces in acli by logging on to any CVM and entering the acli shell.

In some scenarios you may need to move disk from IDE to SCSI bus or vice versa. 

Sample scenarios including but not limited to:

• VM does not boot due to missing SCSI driver. 
• In such scenario disk can be converted to IDE to install missing driver and then move back to SCSI.
• Wrong disk type was used during VM creation.
• Disk index should be changed due to application requirements.

From the AHV Best Practices Guide:

Nutanix recommends using SCSI-based disks wherever possible for maximum performance.

We can use acli to change a virtual machine configuration, in this case a vm’s disk BUS Type.

We would need the following info:

1. Source VM Name or VM UUID
2. Source VM DISK UUID (uuid of the vDisk with the incorrect BUS type)
3. bus=target bus (for e.g. the new BUS type we want this vDisk to use, scsi / ide / sata)

acli vm.disk_create <VM name or UUID> clone_from_vmdisk=<source disk UUID> bus=<target bus> sindex=<target index>]

You can read about it more and other vDisk related topics on the following KB:

AHV | Common VM disk management workflows