A systems administrator needs to deploy an additional Windows Server 2022 virtual machine in a vSphere environment as quickly as possible. To save time, the administrator powers down an existing file-server VM and performs a Clone operation to create a full copy. After both VMs are powered on, users begin to experience name-resolution failures and intermittent loss of access to shared folders on either server. Which action in the cloning workflow would have BEST prevented these connectivity problems?
Enable an older virtual-hardware compatibility level to match legacy ESXi hosts in the cluster.
Convert the source VM's virtual disk from thick- to thin-provisioned format before cloning.
Change the clone type to a linked clone so that changes are stored in a separate delta disk.
Apply a guest-OS customization specification that runs Sysprep to generate a new SID, hostname, and network settings for the clone.
Selecting a guest-OS customization specification (which invokes Sysprep /generalize for Windows) during the clone would have regenerated the machine SID, assigned a unique computer name, and allowed the administrator to supply a different IP address. These changes eliminate the duplicate identity and network-address conflicts that disrupted access to both servers. Converting the disk to thin provision, choosing a linked-clone format, or changing the virtual-hardware compatibility settings affect storage use and hardware support but do nothing to alter hostnames, SIDs, or IP configurations, so they would not have prevented the problem.
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