While setting up a new virtual machine, the New Virtual Machine Assistant offers these options.  What do we want to recommend for them?  Without specific testing, I'm inclined to use the defaults.

• Disk size.  Default = 20 GB.
• Allocate all disk space now - This option gives somewhat better performance for your virtual machine. However, if you allocate all the disk now, you will not be able to use the VMware Tools shrink disk feature later. Allocating all disk space now is a time-consuming operation that cannot be canceled, and requires as much physical disk space as you specify for the virtual disk. Default = No.
• Split disk into 2GB files - Select this option if your virtual machine will be used in a hard drive with a file system that does not support files larger than 2GB.  Default = No.