To save storage space, you can create a virtual disk in a thin provisioned format. The thin provisioned virtual disk starts small and expands as more disk space is required. You can create thin disks only on the datastores that support disk-level thin provisioning.

This procedure assumes that you are creating a new virtual machine. For information, see the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration documentation.

Procedure

  1. Create a virtual machine.
    1. Right-click any inventory object that is a valid parent object of a virtual machine, such as a data center, folder, cluster, resource pool, or host, and select New Virtual Machine.
    2. Select Create a new virtual machine and click Next.
    3. Follow the steps required to create a virtual machine.
  2. Configure the thin virtual disk.
    1. On the Customize Hardware page, click the Virtual Hardware tab.
    2. Click the New Hard disk triangle to expand the hard disk options.
    3. (Optional) Adjust the default disk size.
      With a thin virtual disk, the disk size value shows how much space is provisioned and guaranteed to the disk. At the beginning, the virtual disk might not use the entire provisioned space. The actual storage use value can be less than the size of the virtual disk.
    4. Select Thin Provision for Disk Provisioning.
  3. Finish the virtual machine creation.

Results

You created a virtual machine with a disk in the thin format.

What to do next

If you created a virtual disk in the thin format, you can later inflate it to its full size.