In vmware virtual machine such as ubuntu, there is a 40G disk, which has 20G data and 20G empty space,
so, vmware will use 20G real disk space.
If you delete 10G data, vmware will also use 20G real disk space.
How to improve real disk space?
Firstly, in ubuntu system, you should write 0 to all space.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/file bs=8M
Then, poweroff the ubuntu, and compact the vmware disk as follows.