As many of my colleagues in the text space can attest, having a home lab, or home computing resources can be a big help. This does not have to be an elaborate layout to be useful, but having a few basic systems can help a lot. My intent in sharing this is to illustrate low-reasonable cost technology that you can use in your home lab.
Network Attached Storage
Part of the backbone of my home lab is a NAS or Network Attached Storage system. A NAS provides a central place to store data. It’s like a mini server for disk storage and limited other services. I use mine to backup my personal laptop, store virtual machine images for the compute platforms and software for all of my platforms. It’s also a great place to keep digital music and photos. Many are marketed as a ‘Personal Cloud’.
I use an Asustor AS6702T NAS chassis with two internal hard disk bays, four M2 SSD bays (two are occupied) and I have attached two external hard disk enclosures connected by USB. I have two new 8TB hard disks configured at RAID level 1 as the main storage array, an older 8TB disk for backups and a 2TB disk for temporary storage. I also use the NAS as a log server for other machines on my network. This NAS has two 2.5Gb LAN ports that I have aggregated to my main multi-gig switch.
https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=76
Network Switch(s) and Router(s)
A home lab should have at least one switch to help connect everything and a router to direct traffic to the Internet. A sophisticated switch can also be used to segment your network into VLANs to isolate servers and projects to the their own network sandbox. In my case three switches makeup my home and lab network with additional devices for test environments as needed. I’ve collected these over several years. Some are newer models and some are older and less capable. I also have a dedicated firewall that routes to the Internet and protects my network from bad actors.
One of my home lab devices is the Mikrotik RB5009 router:
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009ug_s_in
One of home lab switches is the Cisco Catalyst 1200.
My firewall/Internet router is a Palo Alto Networks PA-440
https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/datasheets/pa-400-series
Virtual Machine Hosts
Most of my training, test and development work is done with virtual machines. Some of my virtual machines represent servers and services, some are virtual network appliances and some are virtual clients that interact with the servers. I have three machines that act as hosts for virtual machines.
Protectli Vault 6670
This is the newest machine in my lab. It’s an Intel i7-based PC with 10 cores and up to 12 threads, with 64GB of RAM and multiple SSD devices. It also has four 1Gbe copper ports and 2 10Gbe SFP+ sockets. This gives me plenty of ports to simulate various network configurations. Combined with all the VLAN configurations available in the switches, I can setup any network scenario I want.
https://protectli.com/vault-6-port/
HP D320 Gen8
This is an aging Intel XEON-based rack server. I was once a fan of HP servers, but this machine has changed all that. It’s a neutered XEON (4 cores and no hyper-threading) so it’s kind of limited in what it can do. It has 32GB of RAM and one of its internal disk bays no longer works. I mostly use it to host my primary log server and clients for network testing. It has two NICs plus its ILO management port.
Intel NUC 9 Extreme
This machine runs Windows 11 and doubles as my flight simulator machine. I’ve configured it to run Hyper-V. It’s a couple of generations old, Intel i9 8-core hyper threading (16 threads) with its own array of internal SSDs and 64GB of RAM. This setup is pretty versatile as I can use it to host servers and also use it as my primary lab workstation. It runs MS Office, my favorite Text Editor (Sublime), Putty for terminal emulation and of course, I use Powershell. With a total of 5TB of internal storage I also use it to mirror important files as backup in case of a problem with my laptop. The NUC 9 Extreme has two built-in 1Gbe NICs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-nuc-9-extreme-kit-ghost-canyon
Virtualization Software
There are a few different virtualization toolboxes to choose from.
- VMWare ESXI/Workstation
- Virtual Box
- GNS3
- EVE-NG
- ProxMox
- Hyper-V
I settled on Proxmox for most of my requirements and have been very satisfied. It allows me to do everything I need from a virtual host and virtual network perspective, particularly when I run it on my Protectli Vault. Currently I have the HP server running Proxmox as well, in a cluster with the VP6670. One of the benefits here is that it allows me to distribute workloads between the two machines dynamically and also lets me stitch the virtual networks on the two systems together with SDN. I’m using the VXLAN-based SDN and it is VERY simple. I’m very experienced in networking, so I had a conceptual head-start over the non-initiated in this particular regard, so your mileage may vary.
I use Hyper-V on the Windows 11 box because Proxmox is really only effective on bare-metal (like most hypervisors) and I need the NUC to be a Windows machine for client/workstation/flight sim functions. It has plenty of horsepower/memory/storage to do everything I need, so I’m happy with it. Hyper-V is included with Windows 10 & 11 and Proxmox is free unless you want an enterprise subscription for support.
Clients/Workstations
For most of the client-side requirements I have two Raspberry Pi 5s (8G) running Debian Bookworm as client machines, along with virtual clients running Ubuntu Desktop. I also have a Panasonic Toughbook running Windows 10 that I use for programming (ham) radios, running Wireshark and other tools. My main, everyday computer (which I’m typing this blog on) is an Intel-based MacBook Pro (i9 8-Core). My company-issued computer which I rarely use for lab stuff other than controlling Proxmox through its web-GUI, is another MacBook Pro, one of the newer Apple ARM M-Series based models.
Miscellaneous
- Regarding hard disks, I’ve settled on a mix of Seagate and Western Digital spinning rust
- When it comes to SSDs nearly all of the ones I use are Samsung EVOs
- I also use Samsung SDs in my Raspberry PIs
- I use the Apple Ecosystem for everyday stuff (Mac/iPhone/iPad/Watch)
- My employer lets me use a Mac but all of our work is done in Google and SaaS apps
- I have an Azure subscription for testing cloud stuff
Note: None of the manufacturers have provided any of the equipment mentioned here in any sort of sponsorship arrangement.
Another Winding Road 