The purpose of an IT Home Lab is to be a safe non-production environment that resembles a small scale enterprise to run experiments, test or develop software and methodologies across different virtual environments, without having to worry about any negative side effects and consequences.
“Learning is the key to success” and “Practice makes perfect”, are two statements that equate as the mottos for anyone building an IT home lab. The learning curve touches all the aspects and areas of computing, from computer building to network architecture, power and cable management, operating systems to hypervisors, and often automation and procedures.
The basic home lab can be built in a single computer that has a CPU with virtualization capabilities and applications such as VirtualBox, QEMU or Hyper-V that allow for the creation of several computers and network appliances within a single physical machine. Depending on the goal this approach might be enough for most people. The limitations often are the lack of scalability, limited choice of network architectures, need to restart during updates and high upgrade costs. On the plus side we have simplicity and portability of a single computer.
For those who have more ambitious and complex projects in mind more resources are required, depending on your budget this will open a world possibilities with new, used and refurbished enterprise hardware, and with it real network isolation, RAID storage, high performance computing with servers. The downside will be losing some space at home and a slightly higher utility bill.
I recommend at least a server with remote management capabilities for running lots of virtual machine, and a router and switch combo for DHCP, VLANs, firewall and WIFI, in other words, for network isolation because it will prevent different projects from interacting with each other and our non lab related devices to stay unaffected.
Why not host your lab in the cloud you may wonder? Because the costs of running even a small lab on demand basis are very high when compared to the price of used enterprise gear.
If a lab has multiple devices and projects running simultaneously, its advisable to keep logical and physical diagrams of the networks, hypervisors, operating systems and even cable management.
Regardless how complicated or simple your home lab is, what matters is that it matches your needs and allows you to learn more.
