Ulli, thank for the insight regarding the "allocated in bitmap" messages... I suspected they were innocuous.
And... I absolutely agree with your assessment regarding VMware and how they treat VMFS -- we should have some real tools to use. I understand the whole "you might blow your data away" as I've seen happen once or twice with other File Systems... but that's why we have backups 
-- warn the admin in flashing red letters, make them type "I understand the risks" 3 times to initiate the tool, whatever ... but we need basic tools.