What occurs when you inflate a thin-provisioned disk?

When you inflate a thin-provisioned disk, it converts to a thick-provisioned format, specifically an eager-zeroed thick disk in many scenarios. This process effectively allocates the full amount of storage space that was initially allocated for the thin-provisioned disk.

Thin provisioning allows for the allocation of storage space only as it is needed, which means that initially, the disk uses very little physical storage. When you inflate the disk, the entire allocated space becomes reserved on the datastore, making the disk size reflect the maximum capacity it was set to reach. This transformation primarily provides performance benefits as well, since eager-zeroed disks can often result in faster performance due to the pre-allocation of storage and zeroing of the blocks at creation time.

The other options do not accurately describe what happens during this process. A disk being deleted or remaining the same size does not happen when inflation occurs; instead, the disk grows in terms of its reserved capacity on the storage side. Sharing among VMs is unrelated to the inflation itself, as thin-provisioned disks can be allocated and shared independently of their inflation state.