Just an FYI... A virtual hard disk cannot be downsized once it is partitioned. This means you can only downsize it immediately after creating the Virtual Machine itself and before installing the Guest OS.
Shrinking a virtual hard disk is a different story and not the same thing. An non pre-allocated virtual hard disk can be shrunk thus allowing it to consume less Host disk space however if you defrag it from within the Guest OS after shrinking then it just grows and takes up more Host disk space! 
From within the Guest OS how much of the virtual hard disk is used and from the Host how much disk space do the .vmdk files consume?