I am running a few Linux distros on VMware Player on a Windows 7 host. I noticed that the VMware folders are always a LOT bigger than the installed systems.
I have e.g. a Linux Mint system that is 5.7GB. Add to that a 2GB paging partition then Mint takes 7.7GBs. But the VMware folder is over 14GB.
There are six .vmd files of nearly 2GB and another five smaller ones. For what are all those .vmd files needed if my operating system takes only 7.7GBs.