File owners choose several types of compression utilities as per their requirements. Sometimes they may use tar, unzip, bzip, and 7z, among other archiving and compression utilities.
And when you want to limit your space footprint, then 7z is an ideal compression mechanism, and that’s a reason one of the websites provides the VMware image in a 7z compressed file.
If you have downloaded the 7z compressed file or whenever you want to extract a 7z compressed file, you need to have p7zip and p7zip-full installed on your system.