The main settings that I mentioned are under integration services settings on the VM. There's probably plenty of guides available on YouTube for Hyper-V along with the official Microsoft documentation (which probably isn't that great).
Hyper-V is the hypervisor that the VM runs on. Yeah I don't really know which malware scanners are the go to ones anymore. Just figure if I can get it to pass through 2 different ones ok then it's probably ok. I'm sure there's some other good ones out there. I've heard of ESET and virustotal, but I'm not familiar.
I use Hyper-V because I run server 2022 and it's free. Hyper-V allows you to disable any host resource sharing in the VM settings.
On my sandbox VM I'll scan the files then install and scan, then run the software and scan. I use both defender and I think malwarebytes. It's a lot of extra work for no gain, but I'd rather be too careful than risk installing malware.
This is what I do. I have a VM for torrents and a VM sandbox to check stuff that I'm concerned about. At the host level I disable any type of sharing with the host, no copy paste, no sharing disks, nothing. The VM only gets the storage I assign to it and once I validate then I'll detach and mount it to the host.
