In the past when you created a new virtual machine in VMware, onto a virtual disk that would grow, that disk started out empty on the host file system. Now with VMware Workstation 10 ((although I cannot say whether this was introduced with version 9 or 10) the “Easy Install” feature will preallocate in my case 8 GiB of disk space for the virtual disk file. I’ve seen this for Windows 7, 8.1, 2012 and 2012 R2 guests.
// Oliver