Install Kali Linux on VMWare - Complete Guide 2023

Hey guys, what's up everyone and welcome back to a new video

Since we have covered installing Kali Linux on Virtual Box in the last video

we are going to also do that for VMware now, since you guys have asked me to also provide a tutorial for VMware

and because I am currently updating all of the old articles and videos

to be on the latest versions, so that you guys always have the most up-to-date information available

Gladly installing Kali Linux on VMWare is as simple as it is

as it is for virtual box, since we are going to utilize a pre-configured

and pre-installed image that is provided to us by the Kali Linux team

We're going to use exactly the same method as we did in Virtual Box. And as you guys know, we always provide

a written piece of content that goes along with our videos. So I recommend you to pull up that article

while you are following along in this video. In case I'm moving too fast for you, you can go through step by step

I will also follow the exact instructions that are written in the art

All right guys with that out of the way. Let's go All right guys so the first thing we obviously need to do if you haven't done it already is to download VMware Workstation and before the question arises

The mvr workstation player is free now I've gone into all of the

Differences that the free version versus the pay version has and you can also read it up on their website

So it's a link here you can you can check that out But the gist of it is that the free version is perfectly fine to use the only problem

The problem on it is that it doesn't support taking snapshots, which is still fine if you just want to run Kali

and you don't need the snapshot feature, but usually that's something that a lot of us are utilizing

myself included. However, if you want to try it out anyway, if you see if it performs better than on Virtual Box

maybe, since I personally had some issues with Virtual Box and Kylie Linux lately

so I went over to VMVare, but the opposite is true also sometimes

It always depends on how fast the teams over at virtual box or at VMWare are updating their drivers and stuff like this, their compatibility

packages and stuff like this. So sometimes virtual box runs better, sometimes VMWR runs better

It's really a little bit of luck there. But at this moment, I'm personally using VMware, but I'm using

the pro version, the paid version that I have bought a couple of years ago. It's the version 16th still

The newest one is 17, I think. Regardless, the installation process itself is exactly the same as on VMware player

so you can just follow along with this video without any issues

So if you want to go ahead and download the Mware Workstation, you can just go and download it and install it

It's free. You probably have to sign up. I'm not sure. They will probably require you to log in, but whatever, just do it

Install it, leave everything as default. And in case they prompting you to restart your machine

go ahead and do just that before continuing with the next step, which is downloading Kali Linux

Now you can click on the link in the article or you go to Kali.org forward slash get minus Kali

and then you will end up somewhere here, I think, yep, that's exactly where you will end up

And there are two ways to go about this. We could go and install it from scratch, like go through the installation routine and everything

all that kind of stuff. or you can just download the pre-configured virtual machine image that Kali provides for us

Now in my experience, that has been the better way. It's much faster, easier, and it's working out of the box

You don't need to install any kind of guest additions or VMware driver packages

It's all pre-installed and pre-configured for us to just download and it works

So we click on this virtual machines. Then we get sent down here and make sure you choose the right one

There's the virtual box one. There is the VMVare one. You want to download the VMware one

Just click on the download link, it's 2.4 gigabytes. You should choose the 64-bit version if you have a modern operating system

If not, you have to choose the 32-bit version, but you have to figure that out yourself

You could also go ahead and download the weekly build. This is a little bit more up-to-date than the LTS build, I guess, or the rolling release here

This gets updated weekly, as it says. So if you download this, you might save a little bit of downloading updates and upgrades afterwards

You can also see the file size difference Here it 2 gigs and here it 2 gigabytes All right Go ahead download that make sure you have VMware installed and then let go ahead and install Kali Linux Okay if you have everything in place we can go ahead and go through the installation process

It's really just an import process, so it's going to be really, really easy

So you have downloaded Kali Linux, then you open up your downloads folder

And I'm just going to do that. And you can see that this is a 7-Zip file

Now, I don't know if you can extract it with the default window. Windows, it doesn't look like it

So you have to probably download 7 Zip. It's something like WinRah, if you're familiar with this

Just Google 7Zip and download it. It's a free tool, at least for personal use as far as I know

And you can then unzip that. And after you have installed 7 Zip, you want to right click this thing

And then you go to show more options if you're on Windows 11

And then you want to go to 7 Zip. There is a new bar here, a new menu

And you go on 7 Zip. There we go. just do extract to Kali whatever is your version there. So you can see it's 22.3 in my case

They almost must be releasing the 22.4, the last release of this year. So as you can see

this takes a couple of seconds to finish while that is running guys. Don't forget to

subscribe to the channel if you liked those videos. That would really help me out. 95% of

viewers are not subscribed yet and it will be great if you did. Okay, so we extracted that

We double click into there and there are is another folder and if you click into that there is a bunch of files in here

Now we want to take this whole folder since you probably don't want to have this

machine or this virtual hard disk sitting in your downloads folder. So what I usually do is I just cut that out with control x and then I'm going to move that to my

VM dedicated VM drive for you probably you have to create a new folder on your local

machine that you can call that VM or virtual machines whatever you want

I'm just going to copy that and where we are tutorial machines and I'm going to throw that into the VMware folder here and I'm going to just paste that in and it's going to copy over

And you can see I already have another machine here, Windows 11 machine

So your folder is probably empty and that's perfectly fine. Not the fastest hard drive

Almost finished we're just going to wait that out. There we go

Okay, we can already continue with the the next step, that's it

Okay, so we have it in here, and then we go on file

and we want to open to open a virtual machine. You could also do scan for virtual machines

or you can just open it. Let's use the scan feature, in fact, so I click on scan for virtual machines

and I already said this as the default directory, and since we haven't imported it yet in here

it should actually find that and suggest to import it, and there it is. You can also go ahead and just manually navigate to this file

What you need to open, is the VMX file. So there's only VMX, one VMX file in there

I'm sorry, the font is so small. I try to zoom in as good as possible. I cannot make this font bigger

And then you want to import it. And then you can just click on finish

And then it's importing it right there from this folder. And it should be rather instantaneously

And there we go. We have it imported. So we click on it. And the next thing we are going to do is we're going to adjust

or basically go over the basic settings. Okay, so there's a little. not really that much I want to change. To go into the settings, just click, right click here

or I think we can go into settings here. Yep, there it is, added virtual machine settings

and then it's up to you what kind of resources you want to allocate. So always stick to the minimum

recommended requirements that Kiley Linux has. They are written inside of the article if you want

to check that out. But let's say you have 8 gigabytes of RAM available, which is on the lower end nowadays on your

Windows machine, then you have to leave at least 6 gigabytes for Windows to still somewhat operate

in the background. So I would recommend you dedicate 2 gigabytes of RAM to Kali Linux, which is also

very low and will not be running very smoothly. If you do have more space, if you say, let's say you

have 16 gigs of RAM, then I would definitely go ahead and dedicate about 8 gigabytes of RAM to Kali

I have much more, so I'm going to dedicate 16 gigabytes. I have 64 gigabytes in my machine and I have

plenty of resources, so I'm going to ramp it up. Just ramp it up as much as you can, as much as you want

I just always make sure to leave at least I would recommend 6 or 8 gigabytes for Windows to run in the background still somewhat smoothly Okay the next thing we want to do is we want to check the processors and I going to just leave that per default I actually not very often changing that unless I need some CPU heavy or I run some CPU heavy resources on my Kali VM

So I'm going to leave that adjusted also accordingly to whatever processor power you have available here

So I'm going to leave that as it is. As for the hard disk, as of now, we have

11.4 gigabytes occupied and we have still 80 gigabytes free. Those 80 gigabytes are dynamically

allocated so they are not actually used up on your hard disk. They will expand as you fill up that

virtual hard disk. The next thing and last thing actually I want to cover here is the network adapter

and this always raises some questions. So there are a bunch of different modes. As the default

I'm just going to leave it on net which basically shares our host's IP address on the physical network

which also means that our Kali VM will have internet access. Now if you don't want it to have

internet access, then you can choose a host only a so-called private network shared with the host. So this is a

private network that will be generated and that will only be available or there will only be a

connection available between your host computer and Kali Linux. The Kali Linux VM will not have

internet access. The same goes for the custom specific virtual network here. You can create those

networks or you can create some land segments and if you click on advanced you can do a bunch of

settings i think you can also map that to the local network to have internet access i'm not 100

sure about that though play around with that if you need to but you can create some internal

networks and stuff like this and the last one which i should have covered first i'm sorry for that

is the bridged option and the bridge option basically makes so that kali linux acts like it's

physically connected to your local network which means it will receive an IP address from your DHCP server, from your router or from your firewall

And yeah, that's all it is. So I want that my Kali Linux installation has an internet available because I want to install

a bunch of tools. So I'm leaving it on net. That's the default and that's what I usually always do

Now if you look here in the description on the site, you can actually barely see that, but

I hope you can. There is the default username and password, which is Kali Kali and the US keyboard layout per

default. So just a couple of information here, but it's also of course written in the article

All right, since we are now ready to start, I want to mention today's video sponsor, which is

NordVPN. Now if you don't know about NordVPN, I'm not going to tell you, it's just a joke

This video is not sponsored by anyone. Anyway, let's go and start up Kylie Linux. Click on the start

button here and it will go up. But maybe in the future a video will be sponsored by NordVPN

Are you interested in having a solid and secure VN? VPN connection to protect your personal data

Let me know in the comments below and I shall provide. There is actually a link probably somewhere in the description below

So this should be booting up in a bunch of seconds. Eventually, I just click on enter

The counter really didn't go down. Maybe I pressed the button there. But this is the first time Kylie Linux is booting up

So be a little bit patient. The first boot up usually isn't that fast

So I'm going to leave that here for a sec. will be back when it's booted up or maybe it's gonna boot up let's see I'm not

gonna waste any of you guys time I could have just continued to record and save

myself some time but I didn't to save you guys a couple of seconds let's log in

Kali and Kali is username and password login and it's always funny because

people ask me if I can provide guides on how to install Kali Linux this is how you install Kali Linux in 2020 3 almost 23 that's

all there is to it that's really all there is to it that's as simple as it is you just

install kiley Linux on VMware and it took about five minutes to do that

great isn't it so now the guest extensions or whatever it's called on

VMware the driver's driver package thing I guess it's somewhere here I guess we

can install it VMware tools I think it's called VMware tools yeah anyway

it's already installed because we choose the pre-configured image here so if I extend or maximize the screen it's automatically in full screen mode and

everything is scaling up as we wanted to now we can go ahead and we can also use full screen mode I not going to explain VMware to you now You can figure that out by yourself but there are a bunch of helpful buttons up here

where you can zoom in and do full screen and all this kind of stuff so that Carly actually acts like a full screen machine

And you can see it's really fast, it's working. We can open up the terminal. And of course, this is not a video on instructing you what to do with Kylie Linux

I just show you two things to not leave you hanging. the first thing is if you are not located in the US like probably a lot of you who are

watching the video are not you want to change your keyboard layout for that you

click on the start button up here just let me quickly make that smaller so I can

zoom in better for you guys click on a start button up here and type in keyboard then

hit enter now I'm located in Germany so I have a different key map than in the US

my Z button is actually your Y button so I need to change that that it doesn't

get annoying so we are in the keyboard thing then we go on layout we go to remove the system default thing and then we click on add and you can add

whatever language you are familiar with or wherever you're located I go to German and I never

know which one I'm choosing here I'm choosing the first one and then you want to remove the one

that you don't want anymore you can move it down I'm just going to remove it here and then I'm

going to click on close and yeah that's that's it and then my keyboard should work I should be able

to zoom in for you guys and of course some things to do when you freshly install kaly

Linux is do you do a pseudo apt update and and a double end here and pseudo apt upgrade to update

your app repository and upgrade your system i'm not going to run that now because it would take a lot of

time and the next thing after that you want to do is you want to change your default password

so the password for your kali user because it's not good practice to leave that so you do pass wd

And your current password is Kali, then you change it to your new password. And your default password has been changed and updated

And if you go ahead and log out, log out. And we want to log in again

We cannot log in with Kali with a Kali password anymore. Just give us an arrow. Yep, there we go

I type in the new password I just set. And boom, there it is

This is the last thing I'm going to show you in Kali to shut down Kali

You click on this button here and click on shutdown. You can also shut it down by right-clicking DVM and clicking on

Or you can click here on this button and you can click on shutdown guest

Then the shutdown will be executed. It's giving a little beep and it's shut down

So the last thing, of course, if you are on Workstation Pro only because

workstation player doesn't support that feature. But what I usually like to do is I like to do

take a fresh snapshot of a freshly installed machine. That's what I would usually do

after updating and upgrading the system to save me some time. So I would do fresh

install plus updates plus pvd changed and then I would do the date, which is this

right now and I click on takes snapshot and that's it. That's it. That's how to

install Kiley Linux on VMware. Now to not leave you guys hanging, I want to give you

some next steps that you can go from here. You can check out my channel I just released the top things to do after Carly Linux video for 2023

the most up-to-date version of that where I go through all of the things that I like to do

after installing Cali Linux, where we install my favorite tools, my favorite drop-down terminal

we set up some stuff where I show you how to create a new user. There is also, of course, the written article to that as well

So you can check it out on Seosec.com and give that a try

There are lots of Carly Linux tutorials here on this channel as well as on Seosac.com

that I recommend you guys to check out. I also have a tutorial up on how to install OpenVas on Kali Linux that is completely up to date and

some other fun stuff that you can check out on this channel. Make sure to

subscribe if you like this video it shows me that you want me to produce more

videos in the future and it would be great to have you on board as a subscriber

Alright guys I'll see you in the next one until then