Is there any way to limit the size of t he files that make up a virtual disk? I would like to limit their size to under 1 Gb.
I'm afraid you can't do this out of the box. VMware only supports 2GB spare files, i.e. a maximum size of ~2GB for each .vmdk file.
What you can do as a workaround is to create a 1GB virtual disk (using the 2GB sparse format) and resize/grow it a couple of times, by adding 1GB each time.
André
To add to what André said, you'd use vmware-vdiskmanager as shown in the example below.
First command creates a 1GB virtual hard disk.
vmware-vdiskmanager -c -s 1024MB -a scsi -t 1 Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.vmdk
The following commands grow disk 1GB at a time.
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 2048MB Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.vmdk
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 3072MB Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.vmdk
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 4096MB Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.vmdk
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 5120MB Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.vmdk
The attached Virtual_Disk_with_1_GB_Extents.zip contains the output of those commands.