Depending on your model of laptop, you can probably get reasonable speed from expansion storage for rarely used images like these.
I opted for the 128GB SSD in my MBP (last 17" model, from late 2011) and a few years later I added a 128GB ExpressCard SSD, which i use pretty much exclusively for (largely Linux, largely via Vagrant) Virtual Machine images. Sure, I'll definitely order a bigger built-in SSD on the replacement, but on a newer machine without ExpressCard you could also use a USB3 flash drive or (if you are on a mac) a Thunderbolt SSD device.
I have plenty of disk space but my photography hobby is eating most of it and the first thing that gets thrown away is the 14 Gb vmdk (this time it's Windows 8.1 + IE11).
Next one is probably 8 gigabytes of MS Office 2016. How can Office eat 8 gigabytes? :D (Compared to LibreOffice's 700 Mb or Office 2011 1,3 Gb.
And why worry about the new IEs and Edge? Microsoft says they support standards and so forth ... ;-D
Those are only available for the 2012 and early 2013 Retina machines, the first two models. You can also get an mSATA adapter on eBay and use any mainstream mSATA drive to upgrade those which is even cheaper than the OWC drive.
I opted for the 128GB SSD in my MBP (last 17" model, from late 2011) and a few years later I added a 128GB ExpressCard SSD, which i use pretty much exclusively for (largely Linux, largely via Vagrant) Virtual Machine images. Sure, I'll definitely order a bigger built-in SSD on the replacement, but on a newer machine without ExpressCard you could also use a USB3 flash drive or (if you are on a mac) a Thunderbolt SSD device.