Advantages of thick provisioning of storage over thin provisioning with virtual machines

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I typically use thin-provisioning of storage space when building VMs: it provides a lot of flexibility, and seems to be faster to build.

The only potential definite advantage I can see is to ensure that a VM doesn't accidentally run out of available space on the underlying storage infrastructure – are there others?

Best Answer

Thin provisioned disks cannot be shrunk; once you've allocated all the blocks, that's it.

Also, unless you do a Quick Format, Windows will actually fill the entire thin provisioned disk.

There may also be a performance penalty, but that I'm not 100% certain of and is something that should be tested out; I know that was the case with some host-based hypervisors.

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