Chow for paragraph eater.
I have a Linux (Ubuntu) VM running Windows 7 with .net installed to run the Atmel development environment including the Dragon emulator for the Atmel parts. It works pretty well, modulo the USB periodically dropping the emulator. I'm not seeing any performance issues; Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E6850 @ 3.00GHz × 2, 3.9 GiB Memory.
you can even run windows 10 in a VM- you can download the iso and run it (you’ll get a stupid ‘activate windows now” tag down by hte clock, but there is a way to stop that without activating- I run windows 10 in a virtual machine just fine to do my adobe photoshop work on- i use linux for everything else- and don’t allow my VM to access the Internet