A Malware analysis lab

I wanted to build a decent enough platform for Malware and Security analysis experiments.

I started looking at different solutions and products available on the market but to be honest most ideas were shot down for the want of adequate funds required in setting up.

Well that did not bog me down, I decided to go ahead on my own. I pulled up a server grade machine and a few workstation terminals from my IT admin and decided to give it a go.

The server machine had a decent 16 GB of memory and some available storage.

Windows server 2012 and upwards, though a great choice turned out to be an overkill for me. Purchasing a VMWare EXSI would have been expensive for us to afford.

I looked around and found XEN SERVER, a Linux based hypervisor by CISCO which has a lot of features packaged into itself and I instantly knew this is what I was looking for. The community version of Xen Server is free too.

The XEN provided me with 6 VM instances and also gave me a decent testing environment.