I've never seen "hole punch" work in a VM with thick provisioned disks with any virtualization technology.  Not with Workstation, not with ESXi, and not with KVM/QEMU. Thin provisioning has always been a requirement.  IMHO the best substitute is to write zeros within the guest (e.g. Microsoft SDelete).

Are you sure thin provisioning is meaningfully detrimental to performance?  My understanding is the only hit to performance is on initial allocation of a block; after this occurs the performance going forward [for this block] is the same.