Macbook for Kali with VirtualBox

[dziu]

Hi,

I'm getting interested in the field of ethical hacking and I've been check out some tutorials online and learning from Udemy about hacking. I would like to post a question regarding the mac hardware for use with Virtualbox, Kali, Metasploitable and Windows 10. I'm a newbie in this area, so please have some patience. I'm familiar with the MacOs and I would like to stick to that and I would like a get a used mac for this purpose, away from my main machine.

Just today I've borrow from a friend and tried to install the above mentioned softwares on a MacbookPro 2,2, 2.66ghz intel core 2 duo and it's really really slow. I've sucessfully installed Virtualbox 4 for this mac and ran Kali, Metasploitable and Windows. Kali runs really slow. It takes like 10 minutes to appear on screen. The same with Metasploitable. Windows 10 forget it, probably starts up the next day. Hence I would like to ask users about their mac configuration.

Here in my country, I can get a used MacbookPro 5,5, 2.53ghz, mid 2009 for about $300.
Anyone using this machine with the above softwares? Or what would you recommend?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[pcronin]

When you are running VMs, one of the most important things about the machine is RAM. I would recommend a bare minimum of 8GB if you are looking to run a clean host (OS X), and 2 or 3 other machines simultaneously. If you only want the host + Kali VM, you could get by with 4GB.

When setting up the VMs, what did you use for guest OS RAM? I'm running a 2013 MBP with 8GB, and will give my Kali VM between 2-4GB depending on if I plan on running other VMs.

[sml156]

Kali will run fine with 1 processor and 1 or 2 gig ram.

If you give too much ram to the guest you will slow down both OS's, Start low and work your way up. Also if you can put it on it's own drive (not a partition) that will make a big difference

[Name Taken]

The desktop just takes up unnecessary resources so I always run

systemctl set-default multi-user.target

to start without it running like in the old BackTrack days.