An administrator needs to migrate a legacy physical application server to a virtual machine within a vSphere 6 cluster. As part of the conversion, the administrator must reduce the size of the virtual

Cold cloning with volume-based cloning at the block level copies every block including free space, preventing any reduction in disk size.

Block-level hot cloning duplicates all disk blocks regardless of whether they contain data, so the destination disk cannot be smaller than the source.

Cold cloning with volume-based block-level cloning still copies the full block range and does not support a smaller destination disk than the source.

Hot cloning with file-level volume-based cloning reads individual files from the source filesystem and writes them to the destination, so the destination disk only needs to be large enough to hold the actual data. This is the only method that permits specifying a smaller destination disk size than the original physical disk while still capturing all live data without requiring a shutdown.