Under this topic, we are going to decide which lab components can fulfill the tasks determined in the previous topic.

As it is not always easy to get enough budget and hardware to build a penetration testing lab in an enterprise environment and even harder to do it at home, we are going to use virtualization and free software as much as possible in this book. That decision influences the next topics significantly, because it sets additional requirements for a lab.

Virtualization has also another significant advantage—flexibility to quickly modify the lab environment content according to current tasks by simply turning virtual hosts on and off.

For a virtual lab, you will need a computer powerful enough to run three to four virtual machines at the same time. We would recommend having at least four cores CPU and 8 GB of RAM. Additionally, you will need at least 150 GB of free space on a hard drive. Of course, if you have a bigger hard drive and if it is an SSD...