Advantages of Cloning from a Frozen Virtual Machine

A source virtual machine in the frozen state allows you to deploy any number of instant clones in exactly the same state, because the guest operating system retains its state after the clone operation.

When you create instant clones from the current running point of a source virtual machine, each cloning operation adds another delta disk to the source virtual machine. Each delta disk adds a small performance penalty, but a long chain of delta disks causes a noticeable performance penalty for virtual disk accesses.