Something to think about before you convert the virtual into a single/monolithic file using the vmware-vdiskmanager command. With a single/monolithic .vmdk file, shrinking and expanding a virtual disk will require a huge amount of disk space, i.e. these functions actually need to copy the contents of the whole .vmdk file to a new file. With split .vmdk disks, space requirements for shrinking are lower (max. ~2GB) because the slices are being shrunk one after the other and expanding a virtual disk just adds additional .vmdk files rather than to copy the whole virtual disk.
André