I have a host setup with WS12R2 and I plan to create 10 other HVMs with WS12R2 and setup services on each one and I was wondering is there a way to use the host installed OS so that when I upgrade the host OS all the other HVMs also get those updates and that they all use the same files to cut down on space.
I guess the real question is can Windows work like Docker or OpenVZ in anyway?
Not exactly - I don't think you can use the host OS for this.
However, you can sysprep your first guest image and leave that alone. Then make new differencing disks, which are like Linked Clones in VMware Workstation. Specify your original VHD/VHDX as the parent. Then make a new VM for each differencing disk.
Performance may be poor though; it depends on why you want to do this and what problem you're solving. If disk space is your concern, you could look at your storage to see if it can do dedupe. If easy OS updates are your concern, WSUS is free.
