It is typically the exact size of the virtual disk you provisioned (e.g., a 100GB virtual drive will have a ~100GB flat file).
| Feature | Description | |---------|-------------| | | Exactly the size of the provisioned virtual disk (e.g., a 40 GB thin disk shows as 40 GB flat file, but only allocated blocks consume space on a thin-provisioned datastore) | | Format | Raw binary – no compression, no sparsity | | Content | Actual disk sectors (MBR/GPT partition table, file systems, files) | | Extension | -flat.vmdk (or sometimes just .vmdk on VMFS datastores) |
