Now that we have planned and prepared our testing work, it is time to look at the building of the machines. We briefly covered this in Chapter 3, Planning a Range, but now we will focus on building an environment for our pen testing lab. There are a number of ways to build a testing architecture, and we will build the labs in accordance with the following diagram:

The previous diagram shows an architecture that provides us with multiple layers of defense; using this as our reference point going forward will enable us to carry out a wide variety of testing techniques. Furthermore, we can add machines and connect to the virtual switches in the architecture in the order that we need for our testing. The diagram provides us with the capability to emulate virtually any environment that you may encounter in your pen testing travels.

Note the Bastion Host; this is the box that will function as our firewall of the architecture. We can install pretty much any software-based firewall...