Autoscaling is a mechanism that allows the datastore to dynamically grow and shrink, depending on your storage requirements.

Some key information:

• Scaling happens in 100GB in or decrements
• Autoscaling won't scale the datastore below 500GB
• Autoscaling is run every 5 minutes
• Autoscaling does not scale down if the usage% is below the new size (current size - 100GB)

Setup

You can obviously toggle the autoscaling itself. Disabling it will disable any kind of autoscaling so nothing will happen. You can also disable scaling down exclusively, meaning if checked the datastore will never decrease in size unless you manually scale it down.

Scaling is based on two different percentage values, which are called "thresholds". These thresholds define when a action happens. I will take the "Lower Threshold" to explain how things work.

As you can see, I have defined 70% as my lower threshold, meaning I want to decrease the size of my datastore if the actual usage is below 70% (or 700GB from the current 1TB datastore size).

Refer to the graphic below to see how autoscaling will affect the datastore size relative to the usage over time as an example: