There are a number of free and open source virtual environments; we will look at some of the more popular ones here. In this section, we will discuss the following products:
VMware Workstation Player
VirtualBox
Xen
Hyper-V
vSphere Hypervisor
VMware Workstation Pro
The team at VMware has created a number of different products that are available for free. At the time of writing this book, VMware Workstation Player (formerly known as VMware Player) is available free of charge. One of the biggest limitations in the past was the fact that you could not use VMware Workstation Player to build and create virtual machines. Thankfully, the latest versions allow you to create machines. The limitations of the current version are in the networking department; this is because you cannot create additional switches with the VMware Workstation Player tool. For our purpose of building virtual pen testing labs, this is something that we really need, and if...