Self-Service Restore (SSR) relies on the Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) agent to mount a historical snapshot disk to the guest OS via the hypervisor ' s virtual controller. For this to work seamlessly, the guest OS and the NGT agent must support the virtual bus types used by the virtual machine.
Nutanix SSR natively supports the two most common virtual disk controller types: SCSI (VirtIO) and IDE.
These are the standard formats for most virtual disks in Nutanix AHV and ESXi environments. When a user requests a file-level restore, the system takes the vDisk from the recovery point and attaches it as a new SCSI or IDE device to the running VM, which the guest OS then scans and mounts. Conversely, specialized storage entities like Volume Groups (VGs) (Option D) and certain high-performance direct-attached PCI-based storage (Option C) are not supported by the standard SSR workflow. Volume Groups, which are often used for shared storage between VMs (like SQL Clusters), require a different recovery method because they are not part of the standard VM-centric snapshot metadata that the SSR agent can browse. Therefore, SSR is primarily designed for the standard virtual disks that form the OS and application drives of typical virtualized workloads.