Virtualized versus physical

The question of using virtualization instead of installing directly on a system is one issue that you should consider. Virtualization is a common option that has been employed for many years by organizations large and small, with many organizations using it liberally for various needs. For many the driving force for moving to virtualization can be many factors, including consolidation of systems, saving power, optimizing hardware usage, isolation of applications and systems, ease of management as well as testing just to name a few.

However, for a penetration tester, the use of virtualization tends to be a bit different.

One of the motives on the pentester side is being able to run your testing environment in different configurations on top of a host. For example, running Microsoft Windows as a host with one or more Kali environments running as guests in a virtualized environment on top of the system allows for consolidation, along with the ability to have specialized configurations as needed.

Another reason for the move to virtualization is to make use of what is known as isolation or sandboxing. Basically, this means that the guest system is separated from the host system allowing both access off of system to the network and internet without letting the two potentially interfere with one another. This would be vital in situations when the tools and skills being used in the guest may have the ability to harm or compromise the host or other systems.

Of course, you don't get something for nothing and not everything is ideal in every situation and virtualization is not any different. One area which can prove problematic is in relation to hardware support. In some cases, physical devices may not be able to function in the way you need them to function due to the virtualization technology. One example is wireless networking and Bluetooth; these technologies may require that Kali is run directly on the hardware instead of within a virtual environment. While this limitation is not common it can be frustrating. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there are workarounds and it is possible to get some hardware options to work in a virtualized environment that wouldn't otherwise, but these workarounds can be very complex and specialized, and are beyond the scope of this work.

I must note that, on some virtualization platforms, it is possible to use USB pass-through to enable the use of an external USB adapter. However, this option varies in its support and capability based on the actual software platform being used. Consult your software for details on how to accomplish this task with your environment.