- Author: Briant Becote
- Date: 12/8/2019
- Description: Setting up a Home VMware Lab Presenting Analysis Across Different Hardware Setups.
As Patrick Stump keenly observed, “Speed is absolutely key to creativity. The more time it takes to create something, the less likely you are to create something.” Although the DSU IA Lab provides students a platform for learning and exploring via virtual machines, interfacing with the online tool is often slow. Obtaining access to the internet is sometimes challenging due to the school’s firewall and if DSU’s network is down, then students may not be able to conduct their research at all.
Cyber Operations PhD students have many reasons for establishing a home VMware lab vice using DSU’s. In addition to the examples cited above, students will benefit from having access to virtual machine labs long after DSU’s standard lease of 45 days expires. Research in one class may carry over to the next; and having virtual machines setup to personal preferences will allow students to streamline the process whenever virtual machines are required. As researchers of malicious code, the likelihood of leveraging a virtual machine lab extends well beyond classroom assignments to include completing dissertations, professional endeavors, and personal curiosity.
But isn’t it easier to use DSU’s IA Lab? This project is designed to demonstrate the process for setting up a home VMware lab to answer this exact question. Ultimately, if relying on DSU’s IA Lab is not an ideal situation, then students may want to purchase a computer that can support running multiple virtual machines. The following analysis across different hardware configurations will inform us as to what a student may desire if purchasing hardware is considered.
- Setting up a home VMWare lab is not difficult.
- Home VMWare lab is signficantly faster than DSU's IA lab.
- Different hardware setups will produce significantly different performance results.
This topic could be further explored by examining more hardware configurations and determining a true baseline for practical virtual machine use.
- Briant Becote CSC840 Final Video Link to the youtube video.
- VMWare Workstation Documentation With VMware Workstation Pro, you can run multiple operating systems simultaneously on the same PC, create powerful virtual machines to run the most demanding applications, and create restricted virtual machines that can expire.
- DSU Software Webstore OnTheHub provides students, faculty and staff with discounted and free academic software. Here, students can get the latest applications and programs from organizations like Microsoft, Adobe, and VMware for up to 90% off or even free.
- Geekbench 5 Geekbench 5 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures your system's performance with the press of a button. How will your mobile device or desktop computer perform when push comes to crunch? How will it compare to the newest devices on the market? Find out today with Geekbench 5
- [Geekbench VMware Results] (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?page=2&q=vmware) Displays 2,055 results from VMWare run benchmarks. Across a sample size of 50 benchmarks we observed a median score of 837 for a single core. The lowest single core submission was 484, over 100 points higher than DSU IA lab's benchmark of 353.
- Pest Studio The goal of pestudio is to spot suspicious artifacts within executable files in order to ease and accelerate Malware Initial Assessment and is used by Computer Emergency Response Teams and Labs worldwide.
- Ryzen 3900Z AMD CPU
- 32GB DDR4 RAM
- 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD Drive
- NVIDIA 2080 Super Video Card
- Intel chip I7
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- 1TB SSD Hardrive
- Integrated laptop video card.
- Intel chip I7
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- 2TB SATA 7200 Hardrive
- NVIDIA 780 GTX Video Card