Laptop for Live Course - SANS 560

I'm taking a live course soon and am a little confused about the laptop requirements. I have a Macbook Pro with VMWare Fusion and meet all of the hardware requirements linked below. My question is why do you HAVE to have a Windows OS?

On the site below it says "The course includes a VMware image file of a guest Linux system that is larger than 3 GB. Therefore, you need a file system with the ability to read and write files that are larger than 2 GB, such as NTFS on a Windows machine."

Last time I checked I've had no issues running running my 52GB Kali vm, 8gb Ubuntu vm, 4GB XP vm, or 10GB win7 vm. Is the linux image in class not a *.vmdk that I can open in Fusion? I know macOS can read NTFS and can't write it, but how would that matter if we are given a VM image file?

I feel like I must be missing something, or that laptop details section page is incorrect.

https://www.sans.org/course/network-penetration-testing-ethical-hacking#section_with_details_laptop_description

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Comments

TechGuru80

Read above that section...it says some exercises in Windows and some in Linux. There shouldn’t be a need for Windows to be your host OS but you would want VMware, a Windows vm, and a Linux vm.

n0bfu

TechGuru80 wrote: »

Read above that section...it says some exercises in Windows and some in Linux. There shouldn’t be a need for Windows to be your host OS but you would want VMware, a Windows vm, and a Linux vm.

Thank you, I have a Windows 10 vm I was going to bring along to fulfill the Windows vm requirement.

Maybe I read too much into the sentence I quoted as needing it to be a Windows Host OS.

TechGuru80

I saw tons of people using MAC at a previous conference including instructors...I cannot even really think of a reason these days why having Windows as the host vs guest would be necessary but I completely get it...sometimes we need a sanity check.

TechGromit

I can't comment on MAC's, but for a Laptop, I'd recommend increasing the memory to 16 GB, the VM's tend to run better if you can give them a bigger slice of memory to work with. Also make sure you have full Admin rights to the computer, while I have enough admin rights on the computers I use at work to install program's I do not have rights to terminate/shut down the Anti-Virus running on it. I had to take a Work computer, wipe it and reinstall the operating system from scratch to get the full rights I needed for the SANS courses.

TechGromit

n0bfu wrote: »

Last time I checked I've had no issues running running my 52GB Kali vm

52 GB? What the hell are you running on that VM? usually 2 or 3 GB should be more than enough to run Kali.

Danielm7

TechGromit wrote: »

52 GB? What the hell are you running on that VM? usually 2 or 3 GB should be more than enough to run Kali.

Disk usage, not memory.

wrickaz

During class there always might be some problems with compatibility and just maybe saying to bring windows os laptop might save time during classes with setup