Virtual Machines

Many vendors provide downloadable virtual machines to use as practice targets or as attack hosts. Below are a collection of systems you can download and run on your primary system.

• Metasploitable
• Metasploitable 2
• Metasploitable 3
• Kali
• Parrot OS
• Windows
• OWASP Web Testing Environment

Hypervisors

In addition to the above-listed downloadable virtual machines (VMs), you will need some type of VM management tool. For more information on what a hypervisor is, please see this article from phoenixNAP. Below are the currently available hypervisors for managing your VMs.

• VMWare Player
• VMWare Workstation Pro
• VMWare Fusion
• VMWare VSphere withESXi
• VirtualBox
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• KVM
• Windows Virtual PC
• Parallels