The combination of a has democratized network security training. No more obsolete hardware, no more $5,000 lab budgets. Just your laptop, 8 GB of free RAM, and a few hours of configuration.
ASDM is the GUI tool for managing ASA. To access it from your Windows host (on VMnet8 / management network): cisco asa firewall image for vmware workstation
If you want a pre-allocated disk for performance, add -o subformat=monolithicSparse . For SSD hosts, a monolithic sparse is fine. The combination of a has democratized network security