We all know how vital continuous education is for our careers. By better understanding the current technologies and trends it can help us stay sharp on our feet and help us secure our current jobs or even find a better job.
At work you just don't have as much time due to work load and limited resource to be able to learn about new technologies as you would like to. That why I wanted a personal lab at home.
A home lab allow me to dedicate the time I need to put into practice what I couldn't at work.
Because of this it also helped me get vital certifications and develop a better technical understand and capabilities.
The Lab
To keep cost down on the lab environment and take advantages of the hardware I had available.
I choose to go the virtualization route. It give me the flexibility to run multiple servers and client OS's on one machine. Not to mention you can take snapshots so if you really mess up you can perform quick restore and be running again - saving time.
My setup will only be running when i need it and not 24/7. The whole virtual environment can be suspended when I have other things to attend to.
The Hardware
The requirement for running a small lab depend on what you want to run in the lab. It not production environment with full load all the time. So you don't need the state of the art hardware to run it. Many times a pare workstation or laptop will do. And when you got the money you can always upgrade you lab hardware.
A powerful Desktop PC with:
- Storage
- SSD for performance faster respons from VM
- Hybrid SSHD for lower cost then SDD and faster speed then traditional HDD.
- HDD for cheap storage pool
- A CPU with Virtualization Technology Features enabled on the CPU
- Intel based CPU with VT-x support
- AMD based CPU with AMD-V/RVI support
- RAM 16 GB at minimum
- Amount of memory is more important then speed.
- Operation System
- 64 bit Windows 7/8.1 - to fully utilize your RAM.
Please remember this how-to is a guide to help point you in the right direction not rules that you have to follow. Remember to have fun and keep learning! The ability for us to adapt to new technologies and learn is the best part of being an IT Professional!
Have your own home lab setup? Have any suggestions or feedback on this how-to? Please be sure to post your comments!
On the next post, we will look at the installation of VMware Workstation and it's configuration.
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 01: Introduction
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 02: VMware Workstation 11
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 03: Base Template
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 04: Prepare the Template for Clones
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 05: Domain Controller
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 06: Gateway to the Internet
- Building a VMware Workstation Homelab - Part 07: Mail Server - Exchange 2010 SP2 on Windows 2012 R2
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