Linux – Fastest/best way to run headless Windows VM under Linux

I have some remote Linux servers on which I wish to run a Windows-only application.

I don't want to stop running Linux on any of the servers because they do other Linux-only things, so I am thinking of running Windows 7 in a VM under Linux.

The application is a video encoding software that only works in Windows. I'd have Cygwin on the Windows guest OS, scp the input file in, ssh to invoke the encoder, and scp the output file back to the Linux host OS.

Questions:

Will VirtualBox perform OK? Is there a better option?

Is there a way to expose a directory on the Linux host, to the Windows guest, in order to skip the scping?

Finally, if you would approach this problem differently, how would you do it?