Migrate KVM Disk Access from IDE to Virtio

So in order to make the switch from from ide or Sata to virtio, the following steps need to be taken:

Run virsh edit <your_vm_name>. From there, edit the config file and adjust all lines of

<target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

<target dev='sda' bus='sata'/>

so they look like this

<target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>

Furthermore, remove all <address type .../> lines so that libvirt can regenerate them appropriately.

Inside the guest, edit /etc/fstab and replace all occurrences of /dev/sdX with /dev/vdX`.

That’s it, now shutdown the machine and start it with an virsh start <your_vm_name> (just a reboot inside the started VM won’t work).