Good versatile virtualization software for infosec?

Looking for a better virtualization experience. I’ve been using Hyper-V but want more options and ability to use my gpu acceleration. I’m working on ethical hacking and pentesting testing and want to use my gpu for things such as hashcat for password cracking etc. VMware Workstation Pro worth the $200 for the gpu acceleration? Main goals are to keep the main windows 10 install clean with hardware acceleration for my learning in infosec. Eventually thinking of switching to linux as my host OS too. I use VM’s everyday so I don’t mind investing in a good solution.

As a normie VMware is the option for me due to the vast range of supported guests.

GPU passthrough is not possible with Workstation or Fusion but at least you get a smooth GUI within your guests.

You can just download the setup and start a trial of VMware Workstation for 30 days to test it out youtself - have never used GPU-accelerated stuff for “hacking” so I am not component enough to judge if this feature set would even work from within the guests.

Depends on what kind of “infosec” you’re doing.

If all you need are some VM’s to run hascat, network scanners etc. in, almost anything will do(as long as you can pass through your GPU if you need that).

If you’re into firmware analysis, different CPU architectures(ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, IBM’s POWER, etc.), using GDB for debugging firmware etc., or just a generally very good, performant, but more manual virtualization then QEMU(on a Linux host) is IMHO the only way to go. Of course it also supports PCI passthrough.

You can use QEMU through libvirt, which is a program(and library, daemon) to manage virtual machines, somewhat like VMware(in the sense that it handles network, storage, VM lifetime, etc. for you).

Libvirt has a nice GUI called virt-manager, and is also easily usable on remote machines(virt-manager can manage machines connected via SSH for example).

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After doing some research I decided to go with VMWare Workstation Pro for now. While I’m getting a hand of linux, it’s nice to have VM’s to clone and snapshot. Also the GPU acceleration in VMWare Workstation Pro is decent for what I need it to do right now. I decided to add another NVME ssd for use with vm’s only for speed and tying my hand with VFIO on the other sata ssd I was using. Try to keep all my stuff on other ssd for speed of my OS. Opinions on Pop!_OS for VFIO and gaming? Or would it be better for something like ubuntu?

VFIO has come a long way in the past few years, if you’ve got the hardware for it, distro doesn’t really matter. You’ll be just fine on pop os. I’ve used it in the past to great success.

Hopefully once the GPU shortage is better I’m going to grab a 6900xt red devil and some radom 6700xt blower for my top card. It’s my end goal. Don’t have any blower cards that won’t choke my 5700xt red devil. Still learning the ropes in linux working on cyber sec stuff