> From what we understand any issues on the original vm should have been duplicated on to the clone.
The original vmdk was expanded several times - so it is very likely that it is fragmented into several pieces.
The clone on the other hand may be allocated in one piece - so it may perform better.
You can check the number of fragments with the vmkfstools -p 0 command - run the command against the flat.vmdk
The command output shows a list of 512MB blocks - to actually find out the number of fragments you have to check wether the single entries really belong to a new fragment.
A 4gb fragment will be displayed as 8 lines - the endpoint of each line being the startpoint of the next line.