A cloud administrator wants to apply patches in an isolated copy of the production virtual server to assess the impact. Which of the following activities would BEST achieve this objective?

Clustering links multiple servers for high availability or load balancing and does not create an isolated copy of a VM for patch testing.

A snapshot preserves the full disk state of the production VM as a point-in-time image from which an isolated instance can be deployed and patched independently. Because the snapshot-based copy is completely separate from the running production VM, any adverse patch effects are contained, and the production server remains unaffected throughout the assessment.

An image backup is designed for full-system disaster recovery restoration, not for spinning up a temporary isolated environment to evaluate patch impact.

Cloning creates a full persistent duplicate of a VM and is typically used for long-running parallel environments, making it heavier and less suited for temporary isolated patch validation than a snapshot.