The application servers are configured with 100 GB of disk space, but the maximum space that is actually consumed by a server is only 65 GB. Resizing the virtual machine disk or using thin provisioning can reduce the required amount of storage capacity significantly.

Since only the actual used space is consumed, thin provisioning virtual machine disks allows for the disk capacity to be over- allocated, which means that more capacity can be allocated to the virtual machine disks than what is actually available on the datastore. This increases the amount of management oversight required to monitor the capacity. vCenter datastore alarms can be configured to monitor over-allocation and datastore usage to assist in capacity management.