Downloading VM from VMWare ESX to VMWare player, preserving thin storage format

I'm using ESX 4.1 and want to downloa开发者_JAVA技巧d VM's to run on VMWare Player (v3.1.3). I'm able to download and run them, but the space on the virtual disk files, which are in "thin format" expands to the full provisioned storage size.

How do I make the download preserve the thin format, or re-compact the virtual disk file once it's downloaded?

Thin provisioning only is supported with ESX 4, and is specific to NFS and vmdk volumes from memory. VMWare Player uses a different type of disk storage, if you want to create "thin" type disks for VMWare Player you'll probably need to shrink the disks using VMWare Workstation.