Someone did a great explanation on full resolutions in a VM on a Retina display, and why Mac icons look bigger.:
Running the Retina MacBook Pro at Full 2880x1800 Resolution - MacRumors
Apple would rather use those extra pixels for detail, rather than more space (like on windows),
However, why then installing VMWare Tools, on some servers (2008 R2 vs 2016) does the resolution change to "big" despite no user change in VM preferences: (I like to call it 'fixed size' because in a window things don't scale automatically)
example: after installing VMWare Tools
Did Microsoft change things on later versions ?