Home Lab

Home labs can come in many different variants and solve a variety of problems. In some cases, the goal is to achieve a certification by means of having a replica of the needed hardware at your disposal. Or, you may wish to work on different software solutions by means of virtual machines or virtual appliances as practice for a real world environment. As such, the first step to building a proper home lab is identifying what your requirements are in order to consider the lab successful.

The main focus of this blog revolves around the use of VMware vSphere as the underlying hypervisor. While you can potentially swap in another hypervisor, I do not focus on covering them.

Looking for Home Lab Posts?

I’ve created a category for “vSphere Lab” here that contains a list of all of the lab related posts that have been published on this blog.

Good Starting Questions

To begin, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want to build a home lab? Think about your goals.
• What will this home lab need to provide or accomplish?
• Are you working towards learning a product, a certification, hosting an application, or something else?
• Do you have a defined budget or timeline in mind?
• What are your power, cooling, and noise limitations? Where will you put your lab?
• Does the lab need to be accessible remotely or possibly travel around?

Once you’re able to begin answering these questions, you’re on the road to a solid home lab design.

Next Steps

I’ve organized a number of sub sections in the Home Lab menu. These sections are organized to provide you with a logical way forward.

1. Resources - Different servers, storage, and networking components that you can use to build a home lab.
2. Lab Designs – Full lab designs from myself and others around the world.
3. My Home Lab – A look at all the components that make up my home lab.