I thought of creating a VMware Image of Sahana with a easy download size as much as possible. Making changes to Debian or Ubuntu is very much easy and I could have easily created a Sahana VMWare image based on that. But its not nice to expect a user to download a 700MB image to try out Sahana. So I evaluated several ISOs and finally selected DSL which is around 50M in size.
After successfully running the DSL ISO in VMWare I tried to install DSL in a virtual disk.
At first I create the virtual disk with QEMU and modified the VMX file to use it, I expected a SCSI virual disk and I could not get VMWare to recognize the disk I created with QEMU as SCSI.
Then I did some googling and came across the following.
"qemu-img creates virtual disks with IDE layout. Choosing SCSI in your configuration will not work.
Once you've created the image, you'll need to modify the configuration file to tell VMware Player about it. First, comment out all the lines that begin with scsi0, because the Qemu disk will be seen by VMware Player as an IDE disk"

So having done that , once VMware booted the DSL ISO , I could not detect the SCSI disk with cfdisk. Then again after some googling realized that DSL install cannot detect the vmware emulated scsi hard drive thus cfidsk sda will not work.
after wasting lot of time on this , created a IDE virtual disk instead.

After that installing DSL in a Virtual Disk was pretty easy :)

at boot
type install
type 10 for cfdisk
make a new partition as bootable and save the changes
then type 2 for hd install
finally select grub as the boot loader
then boot up

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=82651
http://www.ethanol.nl/sites/Linda/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=23
http://damnsmalllinux.org/f/topic-3-18-9288-5.html
http://blogs.sun.com/tdh/entry/adding_a_damn_small_linux
http://www.3works.it/download/index.html
http://damnsmalllinux.org/f/topic-3-5-18888-0.html