Well like all good OSs you can run virtualisation in Linux. Here is a screenshot of a new VM I am setting up with VMWare Workstation Player 12.
The reason why I am using a virtual machine is that Wine isn't quite so perfect and there are going to be ongoing issues with its compatibility problems, like for example with IrfanView. It is more convenient to spin up a VM than to whiz off to another computer to do some stuff.
This Windows VM will be able to use network drives to access the host computer's disks and since Samba is installed on the host and it has 12 GB of memory there should not be any problems.
VirtualBox is another software virtualisation tool you can use with Linux but it isn't quite as good as VMWare.
