I already answered this a bit in your other thread. But here is a little bit addition to the replies that you already got.
1.
Between Linux and Windows.
I have copied VMs over between Windows XP/Win 7/Win 10 and mostly Ubuntu Linux - as you can deduct from this, for a very long time. There are no issues to run VMs in the other system when you copy the folder, when one VM=one folder.
2.
How to copy?
The matter how to get this to fail, is to use desktop copying - of course, it can work out. However, if you cannot or don't want to check by running the VM that it really worked, use a reliable copying method. That is robocopy in Windows and rsync in Linux.
3.
Limitations of copy/move
a) Operating systems have their own licensing terms. In this case, the matter is about Windows. You cannot multiply Windows computers just like that - at least you cannot Activate them. You might not need to Activate or you might have a developer license, which IS for multiple activation. MS Office is kind of the same. The licensing terms are very complicated, if you just don't want to buy a large number of Retail licenses to be on the safe side - or something else. Hard to say what each and everyone should do.
As pointed out above, if you say "copied" when you first open the new copy (or a moved VM), activation is gone for sure. It might still be gone when you move between systems, which probably do not have the same exact hardware type.
If your VM is Linux, there are no such issues.
4.
How to be able to copy?
You can have an external disk or network between computers. You said minutes - well, networking doesn't do it in minutes. A decent external USB-III nVME M.2 disk might if you have fast USB-3 interfaces - but you need to do it twice when copying from one computer to another. A more realistic time would be 10 minutes or more - depending of course of your VM size, with Windows desktop version, it is never minimal (a Windows Server might be rather small).
You need to use NTFS because that is the common, decent filesystem for both Windows and Linux (or fiddle with ext4 drivers in Windows, but I have zero experience on them).
As mentioned before, you cannot use NTFS to run a VM in Linux (since Ubuntu 18.04 LTS-times) - unless the very latest NTFS-drivers in the latest Linux kernel work with VMware. So, you do need to copy, otherwise you could run the same VM from the external disk, on the both systems, Linux and Windows. That is what I have done a lot in the past.
5.
You asked what is a good Linux system for VMs. I have used Ubuntu since mid 2000's to run VMs. That was the main choice, because Windows at that time was inferior for anything heavier. Vista SP1 64-bit improved the game a lot (if you knew how to get performance out from it).
There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu as a VM platform, but lately, this is my personal feeling, Ubuntu for a newbie user or even for an experienced user, has gone downhill since version 16.04. I have lately standardized using Kubuntu, which is a nice system. Default setups are much better in Kubuntu than in Ubuntu (too many things to point out). Overall functionality is much better in Kubuntu. Many desktop concepts have just gone downhill in Ubuntu.
6.
Between different VM-versions.
An exact answer would be a very large matrix, but it works very well, if you observe a few things:
- compatibility is not really about VMware software version, only. It is compatibility between the version of the VM itself against the software
- if you don't upgrade always to the very latest version, you can use it with newer and older versions very well, within a reasonable timeframe (years, not 10+ years)
- upgrade of the VM to the new version is not compulsorary and sometimes there is none. If you need something fancy, like a VERY large RAM, you might want to do that, but typically, upgrade doesn't make much of a difference
- compatibility, as always with software, is not for going downwards in versions, only upwards. Thus, do not upgrade your VMs if you have older VMware versions in use
- compatibility may be corrected by editing the control file, but I have never needed that, when keeping things in order, like explained above
