I have a thin-provisioned Ubuntu 18 VM on ESX 6 with one virtual disk that is using almost all the underlying physical disk (I have a new 4TB disk ordered to move to shortly). The VM filesystem is ext4 on LVM.
So, if I deleted a large file or files inside the VM, does Ubuntu/ESX re-use that now available space first, before expanding the virtual disk? Do I have to do something like zeroing the available space, or is this all taken care of at the ext4, LVM or ESX level?
More simply, can I get by by temporarily deleting some junk until the replacement disks arrive?
(I'm aware I could do this manually using vmkfstools or some such action normally, but I'm more curious that serious - this is my home lab).