Hello
In 2014 when I upgrade Windchill from 9.1 to 10.1 I took the opportunity to upgrade servers and agreed with IT to move to VMWare (easy to add resources, cpu and memory). As business admin and users the only difference noticed was that Windchill perform much better (surely because the old kit was 6 year old). In other words, as Project Manager at that time, I can say that the move to VMWare have been painless and very transparent. (Of course we had a test environment also on VMWare etc....)
Now, please do not ask me what was the mark of our VMWare, I have charged IT to specs and install within budget so I am unable to tell you anything apart of that it was running on Windows Server and not linux
Hope this helps
Best regards