Granted this question should have (and maybe it has?) been asked ages ago.
I see plenty of people still requesting a way to do a cold clone, only to be told it was done away with after vSphere 4.1 (actually vConverter boot cd 3.0 I believe).
The question I have is why? I can't find any documentation, blog posts, etc. about the "why it was removed" aspect. There are plenty of people out there discussing how to still do it, but no reasoning as to why it isn't recommended by VMware anymore and why it was done away with.
I've only used a cold clone p2v once and that was years ago. The normal p2v method with the source running has always worked fine for me.
I was hoping someone could shed some light on why VMware chose to remove this functionality. I'm assuming they had decent reason, but again haven't found anything authoritative from them stating why it was removed.