The boilerplate answer is to shrink the VMDK... but these Linux VMs use an ext4 filesystem, which VMware does not support shrinking with their conventional tools (i.e. vmware-toolbox).

Using VMware can save labor costs related to testing, because when a virtual machine crashes, it can quickly be rebooted or reinstalled. The virtual disks (files with the filename *.vmdk) are ...

Programmatically, I'm not sure. But in Windows you can associate a drive letter to a disk number, then out in VMware you can associate a disk number to a VMDK filename.

The VMDK file format is used for virtual machine (VM) disk image files. VMDK files contain a complete and independent virtual machine and are commonly used with VMware virtual appliances.