Practical Malware Analysis

Creating Your Malware Analysis Machine

Of course, before you can use a virtual machine for malware analysis, you need to create one. This book is not specifically about virtualization, so we won’t walk you through all of the details. When presented with options, your best bet, unless you know that you have different requirements, is to choose the default hardware configurations. Choose the hard drive size based on your needs.

VMware uses disk space intelligently and will resize its virtual disk dynamically based on your need for storage. For example, if you create a 20GB hard drive but store only 4GB of data on it, VMware will shrink the size of the virtual hard drive accordingly. A virtual drive size of 20GB is typically a good beginning. That ...