Lab

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important. ...

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail. ...

Time for an update on the home lab. 2020 meant spending a lot of time at home and there were plenty of opportunities to tinker around with the home lab. I did purchase some new hardware, and did plenty of reconfiguring so here’s the 2021 version of my home lab in case anyone is interested. Rack The rack is custom made and been in use for a while now. My lab sits in the basement on a concrete floor. So I built a wooden set of shelves on casters so I could roll it around if it was in the way. I place the UPS on the shelf so that I can unplug the power to move the lab. As long as I have a long enough Internet cable, I can wheel my lab around for as long as the UPS holds on. On one side I put a whiteboard so I could draw something out if I was stuck. I don’t use it that often, but I like that it covers the side of the rack. ...

Its 2020 and I’ve had plenty of time at home due to the social distancing and global pandemic going on. I’ve also been putting off purchasing any new home gear, thinking to myself that maybe the cloud only model will be my next lab, but it isn’t yet. Due to the work I’ve been doing with vSphere 7 and Kubernetes clusters, I couldn’t avoid updating my hardware any longer. Here’s the updated home lab for any enthusiasts. ...

To me, a home lab is an important piece of my ongoing education. It’s one thing to watch videos and take classes but getting some time to build, configure or run solutions in your own setting is an invaluable resource. In my life, I’ve never learned anything REALLY well until I’ve had to operate and troubleshoot it. Having a mission critical system crash and having to learn how to fix it is a great way to learn things very quickly but also pretty painful. So to me, a home lab is critical. ...

It’s one of those “first world problems” where you have either not enough wireless coverage at home, or you’re getting too much interference from the neighbors to have satisfactory wireless coverage. I had an Linksys AC3200 providing all of my house’s wireless connectivity and for the most part, it did a good job. I have about twenty-five devices connected to it through wireless and all four of the 1Gbps network jacks filled up as well. Occasionally I found that I needed to restart the router but it was pretty good, no real complaints. However I did have it located in my office which is at the opposite side of my house from my bedroom, which meant some sketchy wireless over the 5Ghz band if working from bed which I did often. I’d have to switch over to the 2.4GHz band and then I was getting interference from neighbors. It was time to try something else. OK sure, I could’ve moved the router closer to the middle of the house, but let’s over engineer the solution instead right? ...

I had some extra materials left over from a home improvement project I had been working on and decided to put them to use on a custom made rack for my lab. My requirements for the rack design were pretty simple. Hold my equipment Make it somewhat portable Needed to be able to work on the equipment from both the front and the back side Able to discretely hide cabling Here is what I came up with. It’s a set of three shelves attached to four posts. The posts in the back are longer because I thought I might add some additional patch paneling in the back. The rack is built on top of casters so I can roll the lab to a different area of my basement if I need to move it’s location for some reason. ...

Home Labs aren’t cheap. Depending on what you want to do with your lab, they can even be really expensive. If you’re looking at building one for yourself, you should take some time to determine what you want to get out of it. I’ve found that having a home lab is an incredibly valuable asset to my continuing education and I attribute much of my career success to having one. To me, it’s as essential tool for my career, but for others its a money pit. ...

Many of my daily activities at work now revolve around the idea of a Hybrid Cloud so some of my home lab activities have also followed suit. I realized it had been a while since I wrote up the particulars of my home lab and I’ve added some equipment so this gives me a good opportunity to show some of the upgrades. Configuration The environment consists of four physical ESXi hosts that run most of my virtual machines. These servers have three nics that handle all of the virtual machine traffic and the NFS Storage traffic to a pair of Synology NAS devices. ...

I recently had to rebuild part of my home lab due to a very poor decision to host all of my nested ESXi hosts on a single SSD. Kids, Do NOT do that at home! Obviously this is a lab and budget was a constraint, but it was a bummer when my SSD finally failed. It might be useful to review some steps used to build ESXi Servers inside VMware Workstation. Especially since Workstation 10 can clone ESXi which makes things much quicker. ...