One of the best ways to learn and test is to do so in a virtual environment. The overall benefits to this is low cost, reduced hardware requirements, and rapid recovery should we render one of our test machines into a nonresponsive state. A virtual lab can be created on just about anything, but personally I would recommend at least the following: Intel i5 (better or equivalent), minimum of 8 GB of ram (The higher the better), and a minimum drive size of 80 GB or larger (again the larger the better). There are a number of applications that can be used for virtualization such a VMWare, VirtualBox, and Xen. For the purpose of this book we will be looking at setting up VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a free program from Oracle. It's capable of running on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris. Virtualbox is easy to use and updated often. The first thing that we will need to do is download the VirtualBox client onto the machine that we want to turn into our virtual machine. http