Disk Onboarding

  • Updated on Feb 13, 2026
  • Published on Feb 9, 2026
  • 3 minute(s) read
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Lucidity AutoScaler Disk Onboarding

Once your cloud account is integrated and the Lucidity Agent is installed, the final step is Disk Onboarding. This allows Lucidity to dynamically expand and shrink storage based on real-time utilization — preventing outages due to disk fullness and eliminating unnecessary storage costs. Onboarded disks remain fully transparent to the OS and applications:

  • Mount points and drive letters do not change

  • Applications continue accessing storage as before

On the cloud provider side, you may observe multiple disks pooled together instead of a single volume. This is expected behavior — Lucidity manages the underlying storage to enable seamless, zero-downtime expansion and shrink operations. To learn more visit: Lucidity AutoScaler Overview.

Before proceeding, ensure that all prerequisite IAM permissions, agent installation, and networking requirements from the Account Integration guide have been completed:

Steps to Onboard a Disk

  1. Once logged into Lucidity Dashboard, Navigate to the Scaler section.

  2. Go to the Unmanaged VMs tab

    → This displays instances where disks are not yet under Lucidity control

  3. Expand the VM that contains the disk you want to onboard

  4. Identify and select the specific drive/volume

  5. Click Onboard (top-right corner)

  6. On the pop-up verify drives getting onboarded and click next.

  7. You will then be guided through the onboarding workflow. Few disk onboardings like Windows 2019 and Linux OS will require a reboot. Please choose an appropriate reboot window.

  8. Provide duration to retain residual disks post onboarding and Click Onboard.

  9. Once the onboarding is completed, you will be able to see the Virtual machine listed under Managed VM’s section of the Scaler tab in the dashboard. View and manage the details of the onboarded disks seamlessly from it.

  10. Lucidity dashboard will display key metrics of all the onboarded disks such as Average Disk utilization, Savings realized, ROI, SRE calls avoided, Disk coverage and unrealized savings.

Optional Testing: You may proceed to optionally test expansion and shrink. The guide here has scripts that can help you achieve the same.

Reboot Requirement Handling

In few onboarding scenarios, a short reboot is required to complete mirroring and driver activation.

When a reboot is required:

  • You will be prompted to configure a reboot window

  • Reboots typically last < 2 minutes

  • The Reboot window typically is 30 min.

Post-Onboarding State

After successful onboarding:

  • The disk is now Lucidity-managed

  • Auto-scaling starts based on utilization thresholds and scaling policy

  • The VM’s status updates in the Scaler Dashboard under Managed VMs

  • Disks are tagged with “ManagedByLucidity:true” for ease of monitoring.

Limitations (Using Dashboard)

  1. You can onboard one OS type per onboarding workflow

    • Only Linux disks OR only Windows disks in a single batch

  2. You can onboard either Data disks or Root/OS disks at a time

    • Root disk onboarding triggers mandatory reboot

  3. You cannot club the onboarding of Windows 2019 with other OS.

These limitations ensure predictable behavior.

FAQ

1. Why is there a maintenance window during onboarding and what happens during this window?

Onboarding disk requires Lucidity AutoScaler to perform underlying operations to make changes to the disk to support seamless expansion and shrinking. This is a one time activity for the lifetime of the disk.  Lucidity AutoScaler uses this maintenance window to perform all necessary operations and performs an automatic one-time reboot (lasting less than a minute or two) to complete the onboarding operation. For details about the operations performed during the maintenance window, please refer to the Technical documentation of Lucidity AutoScalerKnowledge Base.

Time taken for onboarding the disk will typically depend on the size of the data present in the disk. The onboarding window also shows an estimated completion time.

2. Why are there multiple disks shown in the cloud service provider portal?

Onboarding disk operation will perform certain changes to the disk to support seamless expansion and shrinking.

  • The original large single disk is split into multiple smaller sized volumes and are combined to form a single cohesive volume to the operating system and applications.

  • There are absolutely no changes to the applications or the way the virtual machine functions after lucidity is onboarded.

/dev/sda1 : Root volume of the virtual machine

/dev/sbd : Original single large volume of the virtual machine. By default this volume is retained for 3 days.

/dev/sdf - /dev/sdl : These volumes represent the modified original volume and are managed by lucidity automatically to perform seamless expansion and shrink operations as needed based on the disk utilization.

3. Why is the onboarded disk showing 9.49 TB in Windows? Is this the provisioned disk space?

The 9.4 TB F:/ virtual disk seen on the Operating system does not actually contain a physical 9.49TB provisioned disk. This is a volume created from virtual disk to ensure that your applications always have the disk space required for its smooth functioning. The actual provisioned disk that you pay for can be seen from the CSP console or Lucidity dashboard.

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