Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-On Guide Kindle Edition

I've worked in IT for over a decade, and went through that struggle to break into an IT job, and later an infosec job. Everyone that is trying to break into IT or infosec knows the struggle of not being able to get the job because you don't have experience and can't get experience because you don't have the job. There's ONE reliable way to break through, and that's to build a home lab and learn the skills on your own time. This allows you to be able to enthusiastically and truthfully answer interview questions, or show competence on the job.Every interview I've done on either side of the table has included the question "tell me about your home lab". If you're lacking experience but you can enthusiastically tell me about how you've setup a virtual lab on your laptop or spare hardware, configured Active Directory, virtual pfsense firewall, SIEM, Apache/IIS, and hacked it and secured it, then you'll win points during the interview.Once you've broken into IT or infosec you can't rest for long. It's a lifelong learning process and if you don't continue to learn and do in your personal lab then you'll likely get left behind and become irrelevant. Yes, a home lab is a must even for seasoned professionals.This is the book I wish I'd had many years ago when I was googling all of this info and learning it the hard way. The author does an outstanding job of explaining the underlying hardware and software needed for a virtual lab, and walking the reader through setting it all up step by step. There are multiple free hypervisor options to run your lab, and step by step instructions are included for each one.You don't need to sink a lot of money into building a virtual lab. All you need is a computer with decent hardware specs and this book to guide you. Obviously you can run more virtual machines simultaneously with better performance if you have a top of the line laptop or desktop, but you can get started and learning with much less.Every time someone has asked me how to break into IT or infosec I've always said that you need to get busy in your home lab to build your experience, knowing that building that lab is a pretty big challenge for newcomers. Now you have an excellent book that will hold your hand step by step through the process.I don't often buy books because I have a Safari Books Online membership and can read an unlimited number of books online on any device, but this book was well worth the cost and I learned a few things from it even after so many years in the game.

Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-On Guide should be considered a seminal work and should be on every aspiring InfoSec professional’s book shelf.The one caveat I would raise for anyone considering buying this book is that you need to make sure your system is powerful enough to handle the lab. If you think you are going to run this on an Ultrabook, you are insane. You need either a VERY chunky laptop or preferably a desktop (my system with a 5820k and 32 gigs of ram even struggled sometimes).As far as software is concerned, you can run this lab very frugally as the only software you will need to download is either open source or freeware. One factor to be noted is the privacy cost. You will have to create at a minimum one account, possibly two, to get copies of Splunk and Snort (IDS and IPS software).Although the author’s instructions were always clear, creating the lab using this book was somewhat difficult (mind you I am new to InfoSec). Every single time something did not work, it was my own error (failing to tick the correct checkbox, missing a dropdown menu, etc.). Overall, building this lab was a very time-consuming and challenging process. It took me almost two months to go through the book and build the lab, spending a few hours a week. However, it was a very beneficial experience given how much I learned. I could never have created a virtual lab of this caliber on my own without the great detailed instructions in this book.If you are looking to increase your knowledge of virtualization, I can’t recommend this book enough!

First off you should know that this is a great book for anyone (especially aspiring security professionals) to build a home lab. It walks you through the setup of a number of VMs, a pfSense firewall, and logging software. The book ends by giving suggestions on how to add to the lab you should have just created (assuming you were able to follow the instructions) depending on whether you are a pentester, malware analyst, or in IT/OPs.I would not recommend this for an absolute beginner, though, unless you want to do a lot of homework on your own. This book took me around 3 days to go through and I saw in another comment that it took someone a few weeks. As has been said by others, for a first time author to self-publish a book like this is very impressive, though a professional editor may have made a huge difference. For example, I was unable to get an IP address for some of my VMs, so I went into the firewall and made changes to allow the DHCP requests. I knew how to do this and was comfortable with it, but someone with less experience may just get stuck at that point. Later in the book, there is a section on how to setup the firewall correctly, but this doesn't come until later and if you don't sift around the book to find it you may think that there is something wrong with your own setup and not know where to turn.There are also numerous references to other sections within the book, which is great, but would be better if page numbers were provided. I happen to have found a pdf of the book online (I won't give the address, but search you should find it on your own) which had the sections hyperlinked, making it much easier to navigate. Without that, I would have wasted a lot of time in the ToC trying to find everything. Again, it's pretty minor and doesn't take away for the excellent content of the book, but hopefully something that can be changed for the second edition.

I purchased this book because I wanted a detailed walkthrough on setting up virtual environments. Not just spinning up a VM, but actual environments for testing. I am very happy with this purchase.The book is very well written, almost exactly like a lab project for college. Step by step instructions with helpful images and expected results to guide the user through the process.I highly recommend this book.

Very useful book to practise OSINT

Page formatting needs work and clean up (ie: Almost an entire page of white space due to a single dialog screenshot.) Book is physically huge, smaller font and smaller physical size in general would be greatly appreciated.

Best book ever!

Good content and well written, let down by the poor layout/formatting.

Lots of good knowledge for setting up VM lab environments to test and learn.