The current versions of both VMWare Fusion and VMWare Player limit the minimum capacity of virtual disks (*.vmdk) to 100MB (or 0.1GB). Even their command line utility for windows (vmware-vdiskmanager.exe) describes this limit despite the file format allowing other file sizes to be specified (see screenshot below)
If you want to create a smaller disk, then I suggest downloading the QEMU program that allows you to create VMWare compatible disk images. When you install QEMU (at least for windows), you should find a qemu-img.exe file in their folder that gives you the ability to create your disk image. Here’s the command we used to create a 1MB VMware compatible image.
qemu-img create -f vmdk smallfile.vmdk 1M
