Controlling storage space used by virtual disks

A virtual machine can have one or more virtual disks assigned to similar physical servers that can have one or more hard drives and volumes.

When a virtual machine is being created, vCenter suggests the size of the virtual disk based on the guest OS selection in the previous steps of the wizard. The administrator can always expand the drive size if necessary.

Each virtual disk has a provisioning setting, which defines how the available storage space is allocated for this virtual disk. VMware supports thick and thin provisioned disks. When a thick provisioned disk, which is the default format for new virtual drives, is used, all the required space is allocated in the storage right away. For example, when a 40 GB virtual disk is created, you will have 40 GBs less on your storage right away, even if this disk is not 100 percent used.

The other option is a thin provisioned disk, which uses only as much storage space as it actually needs. If only...