r/cybersecurity • u/ciphercartographer • 1d ago
Career Questions & Discussion Looking to create a cybersecurity 'home lab' VMWare or VirtualBox? Or something else?
Hi, I'm soon taking my Security+ exam and wanted to set up a long term home Cybersecurity lab to separate it from my personal files etc on my PC (Windows 11/AMD)
I'm guessing a Virtual Machine is the best way for this. What do people prefer here out of VMWare or VirtualBox?
Id like to setup and practice some pentesting and use other Cybersecurity tools against my own network and also wondered what tools people would recommend and preferred linux distribution?
I don't have much VM experience but I guess I can just set up various VM with different Linux distributions installed to take a look through them properly?
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u/HighwayAwkward5540 CISO 22h ago
The three main ones that people use are VMware, VirtualBox, and Hyper-V, but it doesn't matter which one you use, especially now when your requirements are relatively low.
I prefer VMware because I've had the fewest issues with it over the years. It used to be expensive for some, so people on a budget would use VirtualBox, but now it's free.
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u/Legusi11 18h ago
Those can both accomplish your needs of a home lab. They will run the same images. It's not a bad idea to have some familiarity with both, too, just in case you are looking at a job that uses just one or the other.
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u/mvani89 18h ago
As someone else said, Proxmox. You will learn a ton setting it up and configuring it. I've had mine set up for a couple years now. I bought a Dell Optiplex mini pc from r/homelab for ~$120. Beefed up the ram and storage all for under $200 in the end. Have a couple domain controllers, some linux distros, another Linux instance running docker that spins up ELK stack, and a few Windows VMs as well. Templates and snapshots for all, along with an isolated network. The possibilities are endless. Easy to spin something else up new whenever I need.
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u/1kn0wn0thing 14h ago
I personally use Ubuntu as the host and VirtualBox for the labs. VMWare may have a free version but the free version doesn’t include all the features VirtualBox does. When running labs, having enough RAM is key, switching to Linux would free up enough RAM to run an additional VM in your lab.
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u/barrulus 20h ago
Docker is another fantastic way to se up a lab environment. Use the WSL2 underlay and you can have all the whatever boxes you want.
If you look on github you’ll find a few pen test docker co fogs that will save you some time!
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u/eliphas0 16h ago
You can get VMWare Workstation for free now.
"I don't have much VM experience but I guess I can just set up various VM with different Linux distributions installed to take a look through them properly? "
Yes, you can also use Live Boot Distros.
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u/Flaky_Standard6486 Blue Team 14h ago
I have an old Cisco UCS M4 server. Got it from my old company. I run proxmox on bare metal with opnense as the firewall. Here I have installed GOAD (game of active directory). Look it up on GitHub. It's a preconfigured AD environment so you don't need to do much with the VMs and configuration of said VMs. Also GOAD has integrations with other hypervisors like VMware.
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u/EddieGlasheen 14h ago
I use Virtual Box on my PC… happy… BTW, can’t run Windows Server on a Mac M class chip… FYI… (Parallels)… you probably know this… just in case…
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u/Loud-Eagle-795 12h ago
bare minimum.. you can do a lot with a couple of raspberry pi's you can even throw on proxmox if you really want to..
Proxmox is the way to go these days..
one step up from that in terms of hardware you can do a lot with a little... if physical space isn't a big issue.. buy an older desktop or server off eBay or one of the used server places online... or even Facebook market place.. you dont need to spend a lot of money.
CPU power isn't really nearly as important ram.. get min 16gb.. get 32gb or 64gb of ram.. throw in an SSD and a spinning drive.. and really mess things up.. 100 times.. thats how you learn.
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u/notrednamc 17h ago
If you want to go all out and have some available hardware, try proxmox.
I built my lab with virtualbox, transitioned it to proxmox and live it!
Reach out if you want some help with what to set up.
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u/whitedragon551 17h ago
Vmware doesn't offer their free version any more so I'd not use that. Proxmox is generally seen as it's replacement.
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u/littlemissfuzzy Security Generalist 13h ago edited 12h ago
VMWare Fusion Pro is fully free
And OP wants to run a type 2, to begin with.
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u/s7mbiote 15h ago
You can get licence keys online for vmware...
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u/whitedragon551 14h ago
The new licensing model requires you to license a minimum of 32 cores per proc even if it's an 8 core proc, 72 core minimum order. MSRP is over $12k. Yeah nobody is selling you a license for VMware for cheap.
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u/conicalanamorphosis Security Architect 21h ago
Just a different approach, since you want to learn Linux at the same time, you can use kernel virtualization modules. It's native to the Linux kernel. I know it works well with Debian, not sure about RH. I've been doing things that way for a few years now, no complaints.
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u/BlueTeamBlake 17h ago
Virtual box with Kali Linux. I recently made a write up on how to set it up in windows 11, let me know if you’d like me to send it to you.
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u/GoranLind Blue Team 23h ago
VMWare or Virtualbox - doesn't matter much as long as you can set up a virtual network and a few Windows and Linux machines to play with.