Greetings,
SPC 2.X is geared towards an Enterprise environment. It is most useful in a situation where you have two or more Symantec Enterprise Solutions, and you have multiples of those solutions. (Say 2-5 or more SEP 12.1 Servers, 1 PGP Server, SMSMSE for email, etc.)
It is a data aggregation and reporting server with console integrations so that you can consolidate your point of entry to manage those solutions. If you don't have multiple solutions, then this is not something that you will most likely benefit from. You are welcome to do so, but we believe it's target is a in a mid to larger sized environment.
Typically these types of environments don't use Virtual PC, VMWare Workstation, etc.
As such we haven't validated it on anything other than VMWare and as a stand alone server using Windows 2008 R2 Web Core.
For my home lab I have all of the solutions running on my i7 system with 24 GB of RAM, Windows 7 Pro, and VMWare Workstation 8.
As a supported solution you need to run it as described in the documentation. You can install it in a 64bit environment using Windows Server along with other items, but this has to be done manually, and again, is un-supportable. Typically we will need to remote to your system in the case of any troubleshooting, and if we determine you are configured using anything other than that documented in the user guides we may not be able to continue assisting you.
If you want to use the SPC 1.0 product you can do that right now on your SEPM, and in fact, the SPC 1.0 is already installed and waiting for you to use in on 11.0 RU 6 and higher. The SPC 2.0 product is only available off-box as an appliance, and only works with SEP 12.1 and later.
To be more specific about the answers to your questions:
1) Yes you have to purchase a Windows 2008 R2 NON SP1 WEB/Core license.
2) No, it doesn't have to run on VMWare. It can run as a standalone device as well. It can also be installed on other virtualization technologies, but we may not be unable to support you if it is determined that this is the cause of the issue you are facing.
3) The ISO is only used for the scripted WinPE 2.x installation of the underlying Windows 2008 R2 Web NON SP1 OS, and the seven different Symantec solutions that are combined to make this product a reality.
Hopefully that helps.
Best Regards.