If you are like me, then there's no way you'd even consider Running Windows or even touching any of the Microsoft products with a ten-foot pole (except perhaps the Xbox 360 -- and run Linux on it). However, since you are not like me, I am betting that you may have a need for that Windows-only application for your operations. Whilst there are many options of accessing this Windows application, the best way is to access it without leaving your Linux environment. If you need help figuring out how to do this, I found "Running Windows as a VM on Linux with VMware Server" to help you out. An excerpt reads,

Many network and security administrators want to use Linux as their operating system of choice due to the abundance of open source security tools available for Linux. But they still may need to run some Windows-only applications. So, their choices are to run a separate physical system or run Windows XP as a VM on VMware Virtual Server for Linux.

What makes this one of the better solutions is it is entirely free!