Thin provisioning allows oversubscription of datastores by presenting a virtual machine with more capacity than is physically allocated. For applications with predictable capacity growth, thin provisioning can provide an efficient way of allocating capacity. When using thin provisioning, additional management processes are required. Configure vCenter Server alarms to issue an alert when approaching an out-of-space condition, and provide for sufficient time to source and provision additional storage.

Thin provisioning is an option when configuring organization virtual datacenters. vApps created after enabling thin provisioning use thin provisioned virtual disks.