This Discussion Question thread has been created to discuss how we’re succeeding with virtualization.
- What platform did you choose? (Windows, Linux, Mac)
- Which virtualiation platform(s) did you use? (Vmware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, or your own server farm?)
- What guest operating system(s) did you install so far?
- What advantages or disadvantages do you see about these choices?
- What was the most important “Aha” moment?
- Did you encounter any challenges or other difficulties? (it’s ok to run into an issue, as long as one learns from it!)
Kelly Sharadin says
A few years ago, I got a little obsessed with virtualization and experimented with a handful of distros. I’ve landed on using the following distros as my main choices; Ubuntu, Kali, and Tsurugi. I use Ubuntu for a web server environment where I deploy websites, Kali for ethical hacking purposes, and Tsurugi for malware analysis. Some early mistakes I made with virtualization was treating every VM as a persistent machine. Aside from my web server, this is an awful practice for investigations. Since then, when I do a fresh install, I always take a snapshot as “Clean” once I set my configurations so I can revert the machine to that state, after every investigation for integrity. I use Virtualbox and VMware interchangeably but have made VMware my hypervisor of choice.
Nicholas Fabrizio says
Hi Kelly,
That is a good idea to take a snapshot of the virtual machine right after setting it up. Having that snapshot would make it easy to start up a fresh copy of the virtual machine in case something goes wrong. I am unfimilair with the Tsurgui linux distro and will have to check it out.
Bryan Garrahan says
As someone who is very new to virtualization thanks for posting this. Luckily I didn’t break anything (at least I don’t think I did) while installing my Kali Linux guest OS last week. However, the concepts of screenshoting and restoring back to a previous state are something that I’ve noticed a lot of people in video tutorials, Professor Bailey, and your post note as very important in the virtualization and the penetration testing/ethical hacking processes. These are concepts I have been exploring and will definitely continue to familiarize myself with moving forward.
Eugene Angelo Tartaglione says
I have been working with virtual machines for a while now, I mostly used Linux servers with RHEL as my primary, and Ubuntu as my second most used distributions. I have had these servers running on Vmware Workstation, as well as from my works VMs. I have used Windows vms before, Windows 2008 – 2016 server VM’s for work purposes and Windows 7 VM to run old steam games that were only supported up to Windows 7. I think that using RHEL and Ubuntu were good choices at the time forthey helped me learn the command line interface much better for what I now do in my day to day work tasks. For the personal Windows VM, I did this just to play some old games I previously bought on Steam! I do not know if I ever had a clear “Aha!” moment, it was more of a gradual gaining of knowledge and learning over time that I enjoyed. Some issues I ran into was conflicting repo packages while I was testing building different applications. I had to see what conflicted. I also had an issue where Workstation would just use all my computers resources because I made my VMs too “beefed up”.
Nicholas Fabrizio says
I’ve previously used virtualization at my work and for personal use. Typically, when I’ve used virtualization it is some form of a Linux distribution, such as Kali, CentOS, or Ubuntu. Although, in a previous course I had to use Azure to create a few Windows virtual machines for an assignment. Whenever I’ve had to setup a virtual machine I would use VirtualBox, however I have recently switched over to VMware Workstation and feel it is more user friendly. For this course I downloaded the Kali distro for VMware from the Offensive Security website. I modified some of the configurations (CPU and memory) to utilize more available resources from my host os.
Anthony Wong says
Hi Nick,
Similar to your experience, I had to create a few VM’s using Azure in a class called IT Architecture. I hope the class exercises in the following weeks will provide more hands on experience.
I modified the configuration as well. I decided to have two processor cores and allocated 4 GB of memory.
Anthony Wong says
Prior to this, I have limited experience using virtualization. In a prior course, we created a cloud-base network infrastructure with a domain controller, a couple workstations, shared drives, etc. For this exercise, I decided to VMware workstation. However, I am using the free version and concerned limited features will prevent me from completing class exercises. I chose to use Linux as the guest operating system and used the Kali Linux Live ISO file. I do not have any experience using Linux, so this will be a great opportunity to learn how to use the command line.
I experienced one issue throughout the whole process. After the installation, I attempted to start my VM, but received an error to “Enable AMD-V in the BIOS”. On my host machine, I have an AMD processor with a Gigabyte motherboard. It took me a while to troubleshoot because I couldn’t find the setting “AMD-V” in the BIOS. Eventually, I found out I needed to enable “SVM mode” to resolve the issue. Everything went smoothly after this.
If you are experiencing the same issue, here’s a link to the video that helped me out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrR-m6U6pk
Humbert Amiani says
I chose a windows platform and installed VMware, since I already had Virtual box installed and I just wanted a different feel for a platform. Previously I have been using my VirtualBox with a windows XP installed for nostalgic reasons. On the newly installed VMware platform, I am running Kali Linux as the guest OS.
I believe with the number of tools available within kali Linux, the advantages outweigh disadvantages if any. I do hope to check them out and figure what/how most of them accomplish what they do. I find the ease of navigation through the Bash shell with the right commands to be the most intriguing however, my command knowledge is not the greatest hence a need for me to improve on it.
Kelly Sharadin says
Hi,
I can completely relate to OS nostaglia. I grew up on MacOS when all my friends had Windows – when I learned about virtualization and how you could essentially run any OS on any hardware my mind was blown. Sometimes I like to check out the older MacOS for nostaglia as well.
Humbert Amiani says
Hi Kelly,
It’s amazing how old Operating Systems were top of the range during their time. I grew up with windows, all the way from Win-95. When Win-XP happened that was a game changer for me. and that’s why I never let go. I saved all all the old games I had back then and also my first programming platform -Turbo Pascal- I still run them through my box.
Candace T Nelson says
In my last class (MIS 5122) I was required to utilize VMware Workstation with Ubuntu and I still have it on my laptop, so this is what I plan to use for this class as well. Being that I am not technically savvy (I am actually in the IT Audit branch of the ITACS curriculum), I encountered a lot of difficulty when originally downloading this software since I did not have experience with it. In fact, I made a drastic mistake by downloading Ubuntu over my Windows operating system and had to send my computer back to the factory for it to be restored to its original condition. That was a very painful Aha moment, and one that I don’t wish to repeat! As a result, I will not hesitate to ask for help from either Professor Bailey or my classmates before I make a mistake like that again.
Kelly Sharadin says
Hi,
Thats cybersecurity for you a lot of trial and error! I can’t tell you how many things I’ve broken and had to rebuild. Honestly, its what I love about infosec – failure is always an opportunity to learn and reduce future mistakes
Amelia Safirstein says
I have only used VirtualBox in the past but I plan to test VMware throughout this course. I worked with Ubuntu Linux and Windows virtual machines in previous classes and I have played around with Kali Linux on my own time. I find that Kali is easy to use and has the most to offer when it comes to cyber security tools. I’ve learned that it’s pretty easy to accidentally make unwanted changes on your virtual machine and therefore, having a saved state to revert back to is always useful.
Humbert Amiani says
Hi Amy,
Just like you I enjoy messing around with Kali since it came out. I used to run the previous version (BackTrack) through a live disk when trying to recover or view hard drive contents on crashed computers. It is a neat OS with a lot of tools.
Zhuofu Wang says
I used Ubuntu and Kali in other courses to finish the small project, like build the private cloud server, and I prefer to use VMware Workstation on the Windows platform to manage the virtual machine. In my experience, if you have powerful hardware, assigning more resources (lager RAM and more CPUs) to the virtual machine can greatly improve the running speed and user experience. Since I am not a linux expert, when learning to install and use some open source tools, I occasionally may crash the system by using the wrong commands. So I am used to installing and testing new tools on another virtual machine, make sure there have no issue, and then installing it on the target machine.
Jerry Butler says
Windows server is the guess OS platform I’m usually dealing with within the realm of virtualization. I have used Vmware ESXI and deploying server 2012 and server 2016 for my File servers and Domain controller. Vmware is good with Vcenter for managing multiple server clusters. Currently, I am experiencing issues with our Del VRTX hardware that houses our on-prem cloud. Not a disadvantage for the VM. But an overall weakness with on-prem virtualization. Vmware is being utilized for snapshots, and backing up the system is relatively straight forward. The “aha” moment for me was when I understood the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors.
Bryan Garrahan says
I don’t have much experience with operating systems outside of Windows and Mac OS but I was introduced to a few including Ubuntu, Kali, and Cent OS within a web based training environment. That being said when I messed around in each of these they were already installed on the virtual environment so actually installing a guest OS was completely new to me. Since I have a Windows machine I installed a Kali Linux platform via VirtualBox. I ended up downloading a torrent client as well as the VirtualBox image in order to explore the virtualized environment. I also attempted to deploy a Kali Linux platform via Vmware workstation player but had some difficulty doing so and found the VirtualBox was personally a bit easier to use. I wouldn’t necessarily say there was an aha moment for me since this is very new and honestly a bit overwhelming for me but I really enjoyed the challenge of actually deploying an additional OS myself. It really amazes me how useful tools such as VitualBox and Vmware are and it’s crazy to me that a lot of these are free (to an extent).