A production VM on AHV is being retired, but its data disk must be reused by a new VM next week. You must remove the VM without losing the data disk. Which action should you take?

In AHV, a vDisk is owned by the VM it belongs to; there is no pool of unattached VM disks that survives on its own. Removing a disk from a VM's configuration deletes that vDisk, and deleting the VM deletes all of its disks. To keep the data for a VM that will be built next week, you preserve the disk outside the VM's lifecycle first. The Image Service can create an image directly from an existing vDisk on the cluster; that image is an independent object stored on the cluster, and you can later add a disk to the new VM by cloning from the image. Once the image exists and you've confirmed its size, deleting the old VM no longer risks the data. Relying on snapshots is wrong because VM snapshots are removed with the VM unless they're part of a protection policy or protection domain with retained recovery points, and restoring one recreates the old VM rather than handing you a loose disk. Removing a VM from inventory is a vSphere concept; in AHV the VM and its disks are one object, so there's no inventory-only removal that keeps disks. Cloning to a template and then deleting the template destroys the copy you made, leaving nothing to reuse. Exam caveat: volume groups are the AHV construct for storage that exists independently of any one VM, so plan shared or long-lived data disks as volume groups up front. Operational check: verify the new image shows the expected size in Prism Central before deleting the retiring VM.