I use a kind of POTATO LAPTOP with highly limited resources so when I installed Kali Linux I simply ruled out the idea of using a Virtual Machine (running an OS on an OS is resource-heavy, isnt it?).
Now, I want to install Metaspoitable 2:
1. Can I install it without a VM? (Probably I could not and maybe I should not)
2. Since I can not install Kali on my laptop in a VM (i don't want many kali, that's again a waste of space and resources), is there a VM that could be installed in a installed (not in VM) Kali LInux system? (like running metasploitable in VM along with Kali Linux as the base OS) - Maybe that does not make sense at all :(
2 Answers
- Can I install it without a VM? (Probably I could not and maybe I should not)
You can, but I don't thing creating a vulnerable physical system on purpose is a good idea. Ask your favorite search engine about "Virtual to Physical Migration". It's not very difficult.
- Since I can not install Kali on my laptop in a VM (i don't want many kali, that's again a waste of space and resources), is there a VM that could be installed in a installed (not in VM) Kali Linux system?
Metasploitable is a VM made for VMWare virtualization. So you can just install Kali on your laptop, install VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation on it, and load Metasploitable.
If you don't want to dedicate your laptop to Kali, you can install Kali on a removable drive. An external USB HDD/SSD would be ideal, but a cheap USB flash drive works too. Most of the time you will not be doing lots of reads and writes from it, so even with an old laptop it will be usable.
1) Can I install it without a VM? (Probably I could not and maybe I should not)
You can but you shouldn't. Unless you isolate that target machine in your network to ensure that no-one outside could locate and attack you through that vulnerable machine.
This is why VMs are the best way to install metasploitable or owasp-bwa for pentest studies since you can run the VM with a host-only network card.
2) Since I can not install Kali on my laptop in a VM (i don't want many kali, that's again a waste of space and resources), is there a VM that could be installed in a installed (not in VM) Kali Linux system?
Kali, in it's very core, is a Debian distro. You can just install virtualbox through apt and load metasploitable there. You can go with installing virtualbox, and run metasploitable as headless so it's running in the background. I'm not sure if I understood question 2 correctly, but there you go.
