I recommend Ubuntu Server, as IA is known to use that to test Ignition.
I recommend not installing a desktop GUI on the VM. Text console only, and only use that for troubleshooting SSH. Use SSH for all other access and maintenance. (Absolutely required if you are truly determined to master Linux.)
Your server requirements look quite light-duty, except for Perspective. I'd start with 16GB ram and eight vCPUs.
For the SMB connections to external devices, I recommend you set those up with Linux's autofs to dedicated mount points. They will then appear to be local to Ignition, and will be very robust when connections are disrupted (set soft-fail to just a few seconds).
I do recommend you install a full Linux desktop environment on your primary workstation, and move its Windows install into a VM. (I recommend Kubuntu, or other major distro with KDE. I'm currently testing the KDE flavor of Debian Bookworm, fwiw.) Linux's virt-manager has been running all of my Windows instances for about a decade now. (More than a decade... 2012-ish. Windows8 was brand new.)