http://jarvis2i2vp4j4tbxjogsnqdemnte5xhzyi7hziiyzxwge3hzmh57zad.onion/notes/how-to-shrink-linux-virtual-disk-vmware
The “clean up” feature that VMware has developed for Windows guests can be applied to Linux guests as well, but it’s pretty convoluted — we need to essentially clean up the VM ourselves, trick VMware to detect the free space, and manually shrink the volume. A tiny caveat: This only works on VMs without any snapshots. Sadly, you either need to delete them or, if you care about keeping snapshots, you can backup the VM as-is to an external disk and then delete the local snapshots.