Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-on Guide (Second Edition)

Most Information Technology professionals agree that virtualization is vital, as it provides a safe and malleable work environment with which to learn and experiment. The only downside is that virtualization can be extremely daunting to learn, and even harder to set up with strong security controls. There is a plethora of knowledge on how to build home labs, but it can be difficult to find. The premise of this book is to provide students a hands-on, go-to resource for building a secure, customizable lab environment.

Readers will choose one of five hypervisors for building their baseline lab environment, and will be guided through performing all of the necessary setup tasks. This allows students to become more familiar with virtualization technologies, gain mastery over their chosen hypervisor, and design a safe and secure virtual lab environment for further endeavors.

The second edition of this work covers new technologies, and adds an additional 400 pages of guidance and extra content over the first edition.

Students should be aware that this is volume 2 of a two volume set, and that both volumes are required for the full experience. Volume 1 can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Virtual-Machine-Labs-Hands/dp/B09GXD7QL8

Volume II focuses on bringing students lab environments to full functionality, building upon the foundations of Volume I. Students will learn how to configure the pfSense firewall distribution to serve as the nerve center of their lab environment, enable remote access to their virtual machines, install either the Snort 3 or Suricata network intrusion detection software platforms, install Splunk as a log aggregation solution, and integrate it with either Snort 3 or Suricata, as well as extra content dedicated towards enhancing student's lab environments, and expanding them towards meeting their goals.

Volume II Contents:

Chapter 13: pfSense Firewall Policy and Network Services 600
Chapter 14: Routing and Remote Access for Hosted Hypervisors 656
Chapter 15: Routing and Remote Access for Bare-metal Hypervisors 754
Chapter 16: Network Intrusion Detection 894
Chapter 17: Setting up Splunk 909
Chapter 18: End of the Beginning 949
Chapter 19: Extra Credit 966