The IT Nerd

Investigating scams is not a risk free business. For example a scam website might be a vector for malware or viruses. Which means if I use my MacBook Pro to test something, that there’s a risk that I could blow it up and be out of business for days. Fortunately, there’s a way around that. I use virtual machines.

A virtual machine is the virtualization or emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two. In my case, I currently run two pieces of virtual machine software to do my investigations:

• For Windows I run the free VMware Fusion Player. This has the ARM version of Windows 11 Professional which is always fully patched.
• For Mac I run the free UTM virtualization software. This has macOS Sonoma which is always fully patched.

So why not have a simply have an extra computer or two lying around to do this sort of thing? We’ll, there’s several advantages for me:

• Because it’s on my MacBook Pro, this is portable. Which means that I can use these on a client’s site at home or abroad.
• Virtual machines have the advantage of being able to be cloned or snapshotted depending on the virtual machine software that you’re using so that you can save the current state of the the virtual machine so that if a virus blows it up, you can simply restore from the clone or snapshot and be back in business.
• You can fully isolate the virtual machine from the real computer. So any infections that a virtual machine gets won’t spread.

Now running virtual machines requires a powerful computer to do it properly. In my case I run a 16″ MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro processor. Between the powerful processor and the 32 GB of RAM, I have no issues. But when it comes time to replace this computer, which as I wrote here I don’t see the need to do currently, I’ll likely be bumping up the RAM to 64GB and maybe increase the storage from 1TB to 2TB to accommodate additional virtual machines. I should note that if you’re on PC, you will likely need a Core i7, Core i9, Ultra 7 or Ultra 9 processor with 32 to 64 GB of RAM to do what I do.

Now, earlier on I did mention that I currently run two virtual machine software. That’s going to change as I am going to migrate to UTM for all my virtual machines. I’m doing that because since VMware has been acquired by Broadcom, their level of support has nosedived. You can take a scroll through the VMware Sub-Reddit to see the complaints about this acquisition that people have. And a lot of my clients are looking to move their enterprise level virtual machines off of the VMware platform for greener pastures like Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix or Citrix as a result of the chaos caused by the Broadcom acquisition. That lessens my need to run VMware’s software. Also UTM has much broader support for classic operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows 7. Which is something that VMware doesn’t offer. Thus it makes sense for me to transition to UTM.

So that’s my current virtual machine setup. After I do my transition to UTM, I’ll be doing a follow up to walk you through my setup and how I did it. Stay tuned for that and please leave any questions or comments below.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2024 at 8:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Scams, UTM, VMWare Fusion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.