Sean Massey discusses home lab basics, including why to build a home lab for training, certification preparation, and testing non-production environments. He provides guidelines for building a home lab such as starting small with a hypervisor like Workstation or Fusion, understanding requirements and constraints like budget and space, investing in SSD storage, and obtaining free or low-cost software and operating systems. Methods for stocking a lab include buying new, used, or building your own systems, and using cloud options for some learning workloads.
New from BookNet Canada for 2024: BNC CataList - Tech Forum 2024
Build a Home Lab for IT Training and Cert Prep
1. Home Lab Basics:
The Why’s and How’s
Sean Massey
Faith Technologies
Blog: http://seanmassey.net
Twitter: @seanpmassey
2. About Me
Systems Administrator at Faith Technologies in Appleton, WI
Not with VMware. That is an error on the schedule
Blog at seanmassey.net
Currently focus on VMware View and desktop virtualization
Have had a home lab in some form for almost 10 years
First generation lab was an old AMD Athlon 800 Mhz whitebox running Windows
Server
Today’s lab is three servers and Fibre Channel attached storage
On Twitter: @seanpmassey
3. What is a Home Lab?
A collection of computer hardware and
software that is used for learning
4. Why Build A Home Lab?
Training/Continuing Education
Technical Positions Require 10 hours of continuing education per week to stay
current – IEEE Spectrum (September 2013)
Mike Laverick - “The days of being sent on training courses is gone. The burden is
now on you to get the skills and knowledge you need. It is assumed you will learn
as you go.” – The Register (February 2013)
Certification Preparation
Advanced certs like VCAP Administrator exams and CCIE have hands-on components
Testing Things You Can’t Do In A Production Environment
What happens if I turn off large page support or remove a LUN with running VMs?
5. How To Build A Home Lab
Components of a Home Lab
Compute – ESXi or system running Workstation/Fusion
Storage – Local, physical NAS or FreeNAS/OpenFiler/Nexenta/etc.
Network
Workloads – Things to run in the lab
Hypervisors can be virtualized too!
6. How To Build A Home Lab
Understand Your Requirements and Constraints
Biggest Constraints will be budget and time
Other Constraints include space, power, cooling
Don’t lock yourself into today’s goals
Start Small
Labs can be expensive
Hard to go from no lab to complex lab
Consider using Workstation or Fusion at first – VCPs get Workstation license
Be Creative
Have Fun
7. How To Build A Home Lab
General Guidelines:
Most Processors built in last 3-5 years should run vSphere
Look for processors with virtualization extensions built in – VT-D and EPT (Intel) or
AMD-V and AMD RVI (AMD)
Don’t Mix and Match AMD/Intel in same cluster
Threads vs. Cores vs. Sockets
Memory can be biggest constraint – minimum recommended is at least
32GB for compute cluster
Memory Requirements will only go up
Understand system’s max memory and number of slots
Invest in some SSD
When Buying Used, Caveat Emptor!
8. Stocking the Lab
Three Methods for getting equipment
Buying New or Certified Used
Dell, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro
Dell Outlet for slightly used but vendor certified gear
Buy Used
eBay/Craigslist
Electronics recyclers
Employer*
Build Your Own
9. Stocking the Lab
Operating Systems
Microsoft – MSDN subscription or trials only avenue for testing
servers in lab
Linux/Unix – Free
vSphere – vSphere Free Hypervisor or 60-day trials of all software
AutoLab – vSphere Lab Automation labguides.com/autolab/
Software
Free and/or open source for workloads
Low cost lab editions – ie F5 load balancer
Trials
Not-For-Resale programs for Microsoft/VMware certified pros
10. What About The Cloud?
Two types of Clouds
Training Specific Cloud Options –VMware HOL
General Cloud – Azure, AWS, Rackspace
General Cloud
Cost based on usage
Great for learning workloads and cloud skills
VMware Hands-On-Lab Great Resource for targeted learning
Free
Only training resource for NSX
11. Resources
Websites:
Serve The Home – servethehome.com
Autolab - labguides.com/autolab/
Bloggers:
Chris Wahl – wahlnetwork.com
Erik Bussink – bussink.ch
William Lam – virtuallyghetto.com
Robert Novak - rsts11.com/poho-home-lab/
Simon Gallagher (vTardis) – vinf.net/vTardis
Twitter:
Great Resource for Questions about Equipment