I just purchased a new desktop and was looking to run my past versions of windows on VMs. I was considering cloning the installed Win 10 to a M.2 SSD, install VMWorkstation, and use VMConverter to create VMs from disks removed from other machines that contain Win& and Win 8.1. I thought about creating another vmachine with Win 10, but would that be redundant? Perhaps ESXi would be a better solution? Any suggestions on implementation?

Machine:

HP Pavilion Desktop 690-0067c

AMD Ryzen™ 7 processor 8 cores

AMD Radeon™ RX 550 graphics

16GB RAM

1TB HD

1TB M.2 SSD