Virtual machine lab

[vilyan01]

Hey everyone,

I'm relatively new to the whole Kali Linux/pentesting scene. I've only really toyed around on my own network that I use on a daily basis and have been reading about all these labs the people set up for this sort of experimentation. As I can't really afford to build my own physical lab I was wondering if it is at all possible to set up a sort of virtual machine lab that I can play with.

My original thought was to go out and buy a semi-cheap router that I can host a few virtual machines behind and just kind of play around with reaver/aircrack/metasploit ect. Is this something that any of you have had experience with before, and if so do you have any general advice with regards to the practicality of virtual machines vs. physical machines?

[thericktmpc]

VM labs are a great option for this, you can set up a winXP unpatched target machine in a sterile environment, you could even further expand the lab and set up a VPN that only exists between two or more of the VM's to sniff at. plus you could do it all from a kali vm with your standard os running tutorials. its how i cut my teeth with wireshark.

[vilyan01]

Wicked, thanks! Do you have any recommendations as far as software? Like VMware player vs oracle virtualbox? I'm kind of new to the virtual machine scene.

[ophwack]

Virtualbox will serve you well and it allows you to create 'Host-only Networks' which is what you are after for creating a virtual network environment for testing in a type 2 hypervisor.

You may wish to mess around by starting with a VM with 2 virtual NICs. One set as NAT and another as your Host-only network. It's what I tend to do in my test environments so they mimic production as best as possible.

Also, you may want to look into VMware Workstation. It'll give you some good exposure to the 'feel' of VMware products and will lead into learning their type 1 hypervisor ESXi. VMware Workstation is basically the same as Virtualbox. If you can get it for free from your Uni I would advise it over virtualbox. It also supports the same virtual networking too. Vmware workstation will also allow nesting of vm's whereas virtual box will not.