There are two styles of Hypervisors (what does the virtualization) that VMware offers - Bare Metal Hypervisor and Hosted Hypervisor
Bare Metal Hypervisor - The hypervisor is installed directly on the hardware. ESXi is the example of a bare metal hypervisor
Hosted Hypervisor - an oprating system (Windows, Linux or OSX) is installed first. The the hypervisor is installed on top of the OS. VMware Player and Workstation for Windows or Linux and VMware Fusion for OSX are examples of hosted hypervisors.
With both types of hypervisors you can create the two VMs and have them communicate to each other as if they were sitting on a physical network using the virtual network.
Since you have the windows experience I would use either VMware Player or Workstation - both will do what you need but if you can I would look at Workstation as it has more features and can better handle your intended use.