The hypervisor selection

Today, there are many different hypervisors that will allow you to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine. For our specific purposes, we have chosen to show you how to setup the initial lab in VirtualBox due to several compelling factors. It's free to use, has multi-platform support, and it's able to run within your main operating system. However, as we progress past the first chapter, we will be switching to VMware ESXi. This will not affect recipes in any way between using VirtualBox and VMware ESXi. Our main reason for switching is the amount of compute resources that are available to us in our dedicated lab. We have the ability to run many virtual machines at once, and we will have the ability to insert firewalls and other security devices between our Kali instance and our testing hosts, as needed. We also have the flexibility to create more complex environments.

If, for any reason, you are looking to build a larger test network or have a different hypervisor of choice that better suits your purposes, feel free to use it, as we will assume you will be able to translate our instructions between the different hypervisors.