Convert the PwK Kali VM for use with QEMU/KVM in virt-manager
If (like me) you're after your OSCP and thus enrolling in the PwK course, you're given a Kali Linux VM to use in VMware format (vmdk).
If (like me) you prefer to keep all your virt open source and already run other VMs with qemu/KVM/libvirt, then we'll need to do something about that.
Firstly, extract the .7z if you haven't already with 7z x pwk-kali-vm.7z
. You
will be presented with a giant mess of .vmdk
files, split into a million
pieces. Thankfully qemu-img
is much more clever than it used to be, so all
you need to do is run:
qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 OffsecVM-2018.3-20180821-cl2.vmdk offsecvm.qcow2
and you're good, just import offsecvm.qcow2
. The only other thing I needed to do now that I have my qcow2
formatted disk image is to change it from VirtIO to SATA inside virt-manager. I
personally like virt-manager, but obviously you could just use raw qemu or
libvirt to do the same.
If importing the vmdk into VMware, you'd get 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM, I copied this except gave it 4GB for good measure.
Once the VM is created in virt-manager, as I mentioned before all you have to do
is go to the disk and change it to SATA. If you want copy-paste support, make
sure the display server is Spice and apt install spice-vdagent
inside Kali.
Restart the VM and you should now share a clipboard.
There's no real need to do this, I just prefer to use open source instead of proprietary freeware and I'd rather not have three separate hypervisors running on my system.