There are different types of virtual disks depending on the provisioning method, pre-allocated or dynamic. The type of virtual disks are mainly the same since vSphere 4.0:
- Eager zeroed thick Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK): An eager zeroed thick disk has all space allocated and wiped clean of any previous content on the physical media at creation time. Such disks may take a long time during creation compared to other disk formats. The entire disk space is reserved and unavailable for use by other VMs.
- Thick or lazy zeroed thick VMDK: A thick disk has all space allocated at creation time. This space may contain stale data on the physical media. Before writing to a new block, a zero has to be written, increasing ...