Creating virtual machines in VMware, Hyper-V, and VirtualBox

Leveraging a hypervisor enables you to build your lab environment with minimal hardware costs. Any decent laptop or desktop these days is able to run hypervisor software. When you use your hypervisor of choice, make sure that you configure the virtual networks appropriately. For example, if you require your VMs to be isolated, then you would use host only. If you require your virtual machine to have internet access, you could use network address translation or bridged networking. The difference between network address translation and bridged networking is that, with bridged networking, your virtual machine will obtain its own IP address, whereas with network address translation, your virtual machine will leverage your hosts, IP address to communicate externally.