And when we talked about doing this,
we discussed what hypervisor we wanted to use for these series of
malware analysis play by plays that we're going to do. And we both
kind of discussed that we really like VMware, and we're going to
focus on Workstation Pro.
Yes. I know I talked to you about a VMUG Advantage that's available that you
can be a member of the VMware users group, and then you get the Advantage
program for 200 bucks, and you get every enterprise license for a year for
personal use. And Workstation Pro comes with that,
so that's a really good deal to use it.
And I prefer‑‑‑my experience,
my background's in VMware, but I also prefer using VMware because of
stability. It seems to be really good with resource usage and
sharing if I want to run multiple VMs or do other things on my host
OS while I'm using VMware. What are your reasons for choosing to use
VMware Workstation?
Mostly because it seems to be a bit more stable when I'm working with it.
And like you said, when you're using a virtual machine and you have
another computer running within your computer,
it's going to be taking up a lot of resources.
And VMware seems to do a little bit better,
in my opinion,
working with those resources to making sure that your system isn't slowing down.
Probably the other major virtual machine product out there is
Virtualbox, and the nice thing about Virtualbox is it's free.
Anybody can download it and and use it,
but it tends to be a little bit less stable and less
better with the resources of your system.
So we're using VMware Workstation just because I think most people use it.
It's not that expensive if you need to go out and buy it.
And so it's pretty available to anybody out there.
Yeah, I agree. Free is really good. I think for me,
another issue is familiarity,
especially when you start getting into the detonating malware.
It's very important you set up not just your VM with your CPUs
and your RAM but also your virtual networking properly so that
you're not accidentally‑‑‑yes,
you're in a sandbox hypervisor environment in your VM, but you also
have network connectivity to your host. Right. So you need to make sure
that that's being set up properly as well.
And so for me, it's easier to make a mistake on something I'm not familiar with.
So, I would say it's also super important you use
whatever you're most familiar with.
Oh, absolutely. There's a process to that. VMware is just what we're using.
If you're more comfortable with Virtualbox use that. If you're more
comfortable with something like Xen or Virtual PC or anything else,
as long as you understand how it works and what limitations
it's giving you or, even more importantly, what you can and
can't do with it, just go for it.