Introducing VMware Workstation

The selected platform for the book is the tool from VMware, and one of the early players in the virtualization market. The VMware Workstation provides us with the capability to emulate a number of different complex architectures, and this will allow us to architect the most sophisticated of networks as we build highly secure environments, so we can test the different penetration techniques against them.

At the time of writing this book, the VMware Workstation Version 11 is the current version, and it comes with a number of different features that allow for not only the creation of the complex architectures that we require, but also the capability to clone and build groups of machines for our test environment.

Why VMware Workstation?

We will not elaborate in great detail about why the decision was made to use VMware Workstation. For an in-depth discussion as well as a comparison of a number of the different virtualization tools that are available, you can refer to Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing.

One of the main reasons for using the software is the history of the tool and the fact that it has very mature software and provides us with a robust platform that can provide a number of different architectures; furthermore, based on experience and testing of the tool, we discovered that it can provide a much more robust networking capability than many other tools.