Full File Clone, or Full Copy, is similar to the Extended Copy (XCOPY) hardware acceleration primitive provided for block arrays. This primitive enables virtual disks to be cloned by the NAS array rather than by using the Data Mover, which consumes ESXi host CPU and memory resources as well as network bandwidth. There is one noticeable difference between this primitive and the XCOPY primitive on block storage. This VAAI-NAS primitive cannot be called for Storage vMotion operations, which continue to use the Data Mover. Only virtual machines that are powered off and then migrated can offload to the storage array by using this primitive. The Storage vMotion restriction aside, the benefit is that cold clones or “deploy from template” operations can be offloaded to the storage hardware, and this reduces the resource consumption of the ESXi host.