Book excerpt: Virtualization is a skill that most IT or security pros take for granted. The sheer number of choices and requirements can be a daunting challenge to face for beginners and veterans alike. With this book, you'll learn how to build a robust, customizable virtual environments suitable for both a personal home lab, as well as a dedicated office training environment. You will learn how to: - Understand the mechanics of virtualization and how they influence the design of your lab - Build an extensive baseline lab environment on any one of five commonly used hypervisors (VMware vSphere Hypervisor, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, Oracle Virtualbox, and Microsoft Client Hyper-V) - Harden your lab environment against VM escapes and other security threats - Configure the pfSense firewall distribution to provide security, segmentation, and network services to your virtual lab - Deploy either Snort or Suricata open-source IDS platforms in IPS mode to further enhance the flexibility, segmentation and security of your lab network - Deploy Splunk as a log management solution for your lab - Reconfigure the provided baseline lab environment to better suit your individual needs Easy to follow steps and illustrations provide detailed, comprehensive guidance as you build your custom-tailored lab. Both IT and security professionals need practice environments to better hone their craft. Learn how to build and maintain your own with Building Flexible Virtual Machine Labs