Falling in Love with VirtualBox

I’ve always enjoyed using Linux distributions because they’re open source and way more stable compared to Windows. After UNIX Solaris, the second Linux distribution I learned to use was Ubuntu, about six years ago.

I ran Ubuntu natively on a partition of my Dell Mini’s hard drive for a long time. The other partition ran Windows, of course. I seldom had problems, but eventually the Mini got very slow. It was taking about four minutes for Windows to fully boot and load, but almost no delays when loading Linux. It became very annoying.

In 2019, I ditched the Dell for a Macbook Air which had the perfect resolution for my web development and design work. I did miss Linux though and planned to partition its hard drive to install Ubuntu, but was always a bit hesitant. Then, I learned about virtualization in my Caltech program and tried Virtual Box for the first time.

I liked the ability to run many VMs on a host machine, but the Macbook’s 8 gigs of RAM wasn’t cutting it. There were hiccups running my Kali Linux VM every now and then. Sometimes the laptop would just freeze. So, I ended up needing to buy another laptop. I downgraded from a Mac to a PC running Windows 10, but at least it had more horsepower.

I’ve been able to install five VMs on the new host machine and also started to play around with Docker without any RAM problems. The only issue is that VM snapshots take quite a bit of space, but other than that, I love virtualization.

So, which VMs have I installed so far? Kali-Linux, Metasploitable, Ubuntu, Parrot, and CentOS. My next project is to download the FLARE VM from Fire Eye to improve my blue team skills. I can’t wait!