I agree, VMware is the best way to go. It's completely isolated and it's portable, since you can carry the virtual machine on a flash drive or external HDD and use it on any other computers you want.
i started off with a fresh reformatted computer when i just got into stealth. i started off super cautious making sure to i did as much as i can to not get linked. Since then, i don't bother with such extreme caution since I gained a lot knowledge about stealthing successfully.
Congrats, you are one step closer to going stealth successfully.