I actually had 4 vms on my working version of Fusion (Windows NT, Windows XP Pro, Windows 7 Ultimate, and Windows 10). I think when I created the Win10 vm, I built it on the Win7 vm (when my machine crapped out and I tried to open the Win10 vm, it wants to know where the Win7 vm files were).
I went back to a few days before my machine crapped out and restored the Windows 10.vmwarevm from TimeMachine. Inside the package is a file called Windows 7.vmdk (there were no other vmdk files in there. All the other Virtual Machines either only had a single vmdk file or multiple vmdk files because I created the vms without a specified file allocation size). I copied that file to a Windows laptop and using 7-Zip, I was able to open the file and found my files.
So, yes, 7-Zip will expand VMware *.vmdk files. You just have to find the correct vmdk file to start with.
Since I can't run Fusion on my M1 iMac any more, I really don't care about clobbering something.
