have two vmware folders with the same name

I upgraded my windows 7 to windows 10. in my documents folder i have two vmware virtual machines with the same name
one is 127 gb and one is 35 mb. Obviously the larger one contains my operating system. Why did this happen?
And by the way they are both named windows 7 even though 10 is installed.

can i safely remove the smaller file without any harm?

You upgraded a vmware install of Windows 7 to Windows 10 - correct? And now you have in your documents folder two vmware folders that are labeled Windows 7 - correct? My guess is that when you upgraded it moved your Windows 7 install to those folders in case you did an uninstall.

On a PC when it was upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7, there was a folder created in the root directory called Windows.old. This was the old install of Windows 7 and if you decided you did not like Windows 10 you could select to role back to Windows 7. What Microsoft did not make clear was that after 30 days that option was removed supposedly to free up the disk space just in case you could not make that decision on your own.

You could try moving the folders to the trash and if everything works well then delete them. If the one is too large for the trash, either move it to an external drive or rename it and see what happens.

Lisa