Setting Up a Test Environment

How Can I Setup Virtual Machines On My Own? What Are My Options?

Let’s start with your options. You might be wondering how you can build machines to test and experiment with. How can I practice pentesting on a machine? How can I practice (digital forensics and incident response) DFIR on a machine? How can I learn to build workstations? Well, you have quite a few choices. Generally speaking you can go down the home lab route (be careful though, the hobby can get expensive quickly) and build out a server or you can build some virtual machines on your personal workstation, the general advice though — DON’T do it on your daily driver operating system. After publishing this I will have a follow up discussing some of the options I have taken and a short walkthrough of both my home ProxMox machine and my workstations VMware setup.

Home Lab

Let’s start with the home lab route, you’ll find I generally won’t try to reinvent the wheel, especially if there is a great community who is discussing/explaining a topic — introducing r/homelab. I am a huge fan of reddit and some great content is aggregated on the platform with a community that is passionate for just about every topic out there. I recommend you start with “Introduction to Home Labs” and go from there. This can be as simple as you having a spare computer that sits around and you want to build into a server, all the way to having a purpose built machine to host your operating systems and applications. The world is your oyster, my friends.

The final mention for setting up a home lab for virtualization is the software choices, which at the time of this writing is a controversial topic. I used to run VMware ESXi on my home server and then came along Broadcom…who took away the free version of the software. That led me to ProxMox, which so far, I LOVE. I won’t turn this into a dig at Broadcom though, you can find that in a lot of other places on the internet.

Anyways, I have an article here about installing ProxMox on my home server that would be a good foundation for just about everything I am going to discuss.

Desktop Virtualization

But Jose, what if I just want to run some applications and operating systems on my personal machine? Well, great news, we will discuss that as well! I spend a ton of time on the road for my job and it would be a significant limiting factor for me to not be able to test while on the road. Just like everything else in technology, we are lucky enough to have quite a few choices. Generally, you will see VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation as the large names recommended, I lean towards VMWare Workstation Pro as its currently free for personal use (thanks for giving us that Broadcom) and I personally recommend it as well.

That essentially covers setting up a test environment. If you want to know how to install ProxMox I cover that here, if you want to setup a virtual machine I cover that here. Thanks for reading!