Question & Answer
Question
What methods are used to clone a physical disk drive to a virtual disk Drive?
Answer
There are three main methods used by VMware Converter® to accomplish the cloning a physical disk into a virtual disk.
1) Disk-based Block-Level (Disk-based)
This method of cloning is enabled when you choose to import all disks without selecting/resizing volumes. In this mode the disks are copied to the destination block by block. This method is the least likely to fail due to volume structure. If cloning with one of the other methods fail try getting a disk based clone which can then be used by developers for troubleshooting the bug.
This option is not available when doing Hot Clones (local or remote).
2) Volume-based Block-Level (Volume-based)
This method of cloning is enabled when you choose to import all or a subset of volumes without resizing them. In this method, we examine the source partition to determine what the partition boundaries are on-disk and then copy just the selected partitions on to the target disk on a block-by-block basis. The partition order may not always be preserved in the target VM (especially if there are diagnostic partitions in the source). This means that Post-cloning related issues are more likely to show up here.
Non-windows VMs cloned with volume-based cloning are almost guaranteed to not be able to boot.
3) Volume-based File-Level (File-level)
This method of cloning is enabled when you select one or more volumes for cloning and resize any one of them. Here, converter creates the target disk, partitions and formats it appropriately and copies over data from the source to the target on a file-by-file basis.
Resizing the disk smaller in size will force a file-level clone
1) Disk-based Block-Level (Disk-based)
This method of cloning is enabled when you choose to import all disks without selecting/resizing volumes. In this mode the disks are copied to the destination block by block. This method is the least likely to fail due to volume structure. If cloning with one of the other methods fail try getting a disk based clone which can then be used by developers for troubleshooting the bug.
This option is not available when doing Hot Clones (local or remote).
2) Volume-based Block-Level (Volume-based)
This method of cloning is enabled when you choose to import all or a subset of volumes without resizing them. In this method, we examine the source partition to determine what the partition boundaries are on-disk and then copy just the selected partitions on to the target disk on a block-by-block basis. The partition order may not always be preserved in the target VM (especially if there are diagnostic partitions in the source). This means that Post-cloning related issues are more likely to show up here.
Non-windows VMs cloned with volume-based cloning are almost guaranteed to not be able to boot.
3) Volume-based File-Level (File-level)
This method of cloning is enabled when you select one or more volumes for cloning and resize any one of them. Here, converter creates the target disk, partitions and formats it appropriately and copies over data from the source to the target on a file-by-file basis.
Resizing the disk smaller in size will force a file-level clone
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Document Information
Modified date:
27 February 2020
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isg3T1010834