Deploying IBM QRadar Community Edition on VMware Workstation

Practical Lab: From ISO Image to Dashboard Access

After completing the QRadar architecture learning phase, the next practical step was to deploy IBM QRadar Community Edition in a hands-on lab environment.

The goal of this lab was simple:

Install QRadar Community Edition, configure the virtual machine, resolve deployment issues, and successfully access the QRadar dashboard.

In this blog, I will document the complete QRadar CE deployment journey on VMware Workstation, including ISO preparation, VMware configuration, installation type selection, troubleshooting, and final dashboard access.

This is part of my QRadar practical learning roadmap where Day 1 focused on QRadar architecture, and Day 2 focused on QRadar deployment and initial configuration.

Lab Objective

The objective of this lab was to deploy IBM QRadar Community Edition in a local VMware environment and prepare it for future Windows and Linux log source integration.

By the end of this phase, the target was to achieve the following:

• Download QRadar CE ISO and license key
• Create a QRadar virtual machine in VMware…