Your Homelab/The ideal homelab

[SHimmer45]

As per the title really how many people tinker alot at home and what do you use to do some "self learning" and testing.

seeing as i dont play many games etc at the moment my old Phenom II and a R0 array does some VMing for me but its a little limited for testing out anything like ESXI etc.

 

i have images of some people having a whole rack entrenched in the spare room

[MattDLEA]

Sorry for maybe hijacking this thread. But id like to ask as it is related to it what would make a good machine for testing / playing on?

 

I look after 2 networks. However the Servers were installed and set up by someone else. I just keep them going. But would love to be able to test think and learn how to make a DC and file server from scratch.

I'd like to look into virtualisation but think that may be a bit to advanced for the equipment i have at the moment.

[plexer]

My homelab revolves around beer and diy stuff coming from the mancave.

 

I do not have any equipment for testing it related stuff at home it's enough to have it work for me.

 

Ben

[synaesthesia]

I used to have half a rack's worth of gear - some network switches of some considerable age (3com), router and a pair of beige fronted Compaq servers with a external scsi 14 bay drive array. It was literally just a testbed and used to run esx (3 I think) and tinkered with Linux and what-not. It soon disappeared when I got married! These days any testing is on VMware workstation at home but tend to keep the majority at work.

[detjo]

I cant really be ar$ed testing at home anymore, I would rather play games

When I started IT I used an HP ProLiant ML350 G3 (now collecting dust in the corner) and VMs

[SYNACK]

You don't need a big lab anymore, a decent motherboard, i5 or 7, a stack of ram and a nice quiet case you can esxi or Hyper-v it up and run it as a tested and standard station, a managed switch that supports vlans and you can run a massive amount. On the other hand most stuff you can spin up virtually on a decent spec laptop these days. I to have given up testing stuff at home, if they want me to do it for them they can pay me for it... at work. Any server stuff I run at home now is for my own use and run on a low power atom box with a stack of storage hidden away and only ever remoted into.

[kmount]

You don't need a big lab anymore, a decent motherboard, i5 or 7, a stack of ram and a nice quiet case you can esxi or Hyper-v it up and run it as a tested and standard station, a managed switch that supports vlans and you can run a massive amount. On the other hand most stuff you can spin up virtually on a decent spec laptop these days. I to have given up testing stuff at home, if they want me to do it for them they can pay me for it... at work. Any server stuff I run at home now is for my own use and run on a low power atom box with a stack of storage hidden away and only ever remoted into.

 

Absolutely, I have a Shuttle SZ77R5 with an i7 3.4GHz CPU, and 32GB of RAM with an SSD & HDD running ESXi and my labs all virtualised therein.

 

It replaced a bunch of screaming loud 1u chassis servers running physical OS instances.

[pete]

Intel NUC, 16GB ram, SSD, and thin-provisioned VMs under ESXi. Fanless Procurve and a HP microserver running Freenas for messing around with iSCSI and NFS mounts plus general household fileserving and backups.

[CyberNerd]

Internet connection and a bunch of servers at the other end (VM's in school) is my lab.

[Quackers]

I use to like 10 years ago, would have servers and clients and play but now i just don't bother, in fact i don't even have a Windows PC/Laptop at home anymore.

[twin--turbo]

My server was a old Dell Dimension 3000, that got P2V'd to an old stone quad core jobbie with 8gb ram.

 

I used to have a cisco lab of various routes and switches but it took up too much space so sold it on. And I can do most of it anyway now.

[dhicks]

Intel NUC, 16GB ram, SSD, and thin-provisioned VMs under ESXi.

 

I have a very similar setup to Pete, as above, although I went for one of Tranquil PC's passivly-cooled NUC cases to make my PC completly silent. I have mine hooked up to 10 SATA drives via SATA expander cards (there's a thread somewhere from a few months ago with me and Pete discussing this) and set up running OpenStack, with the idea being that I can have my own private cloud that I can interchange VMs with RackSpace's and/or Amazon's systems.

[CAWJames]

I have a Wyse Z90 thin client with 4GB of RAM running Debian Jessie and a 1TB internal 3.5 drive strapped to the outside Very quiet (although its hard wired in the garage) and does all the linux testing I need, plus general household stuff like storage, autotorrents, webcam streaming and collation from the 5 Pi's around the house, music server/whole house audio, video server for the "connected living room" etc. Windows testing is done on the 72GB 4TB Dual Quad Xeon servers at work over VPN if needed My first PC had a full 1MB of RAM and no HD, oh how things have changed!

 

James

[cpjitservices]

In my home lab 2x HP Procurves 2810's I think, I also have A Juniper J-Series 2350, 2x PFSense boxes (Which I want to swap out for Watchguards), 1x IBM Rack Mounted server (3600 Series?), and a Mini HP MicroServer whci I use for network storage. I also have my DVR in the same rack for my CCTV.

[gmonks]

Zoosk tower. 8GB RAM 1TB HDD - File Server.

[hardtailstar]

I dont at the moment but will be setting something up soon.

[cpjitservices]

I havent been in my lab for ages, I have a monitor that sites in the front of my rack that is always on for my CCTV, but I havent touched the lab in months.

 

Need to get in there and build some Juniper Olives, and learn.

 

I desperately need to get my hands on some watchguard Fireboxes to get rid of the 2 physical PC's I have in the rack running pfsense, and a new rack.

[2097]

Spare room - 12u Rack Cabinet

 

1x 4U custom server 2x Xeons , 4x HDD , 1x SSD , 24gb RAM running Vmware ESXI

( servers include a few server 2008's for entertainment like movies and music shares for Sonos,dreambox and CCTV , a few centos servers for Deluge , apache etc , and a server 2012 server for learning also running pfsense as a router)

 

1x 2811 Cisco router running IOS 15 and CME - Initally used for learning but is now setup as a home VOIP system ( connected to home telephone ) have a few wireless 7925g's and a few larger wired colour screen Ip phones.

 

1x layer 2 HP switch

 

1x 1041n Cisco wireless access point

 

1x Rack console

 

Most of the above is used in a working environment , as the whole house is wired in and each server feeds and connects to devices around the house .

 

My main PC is just a alienware desktop i7 , SSD , 16gb ram , GTX 470

[X-13]

My "lab" is just the laptop I use mostly for gaming.

[Jamman960]

When I was younger I had a few old desktops running various server os's at home but since getting married etc I'm lucky to have a 1tb buffalo network drive and a laptop.

 

I'm hoping to retire one or two servers here in the next few months as well as moving to VMWare so may keep one knocking around as a testbed, not sure taking it home(dual quad xeon) to eat our electric is a good idea can't believe I had trouble finding a usb keyboard at home when repairing a friends pc, I used to have spares of anything and everything at home!

[SHimmer45]

i had a massive clear out the other weak of all the old shite i was keeping.

 

wanders off to ebay to look for a suitable shuttle/small pc....

[Gatt]

Custom built server - (Quad Core i5, 32GB ram, 2 x 2TB drives)

Running Server 2008 R2 Core with Hyper-V host

Several VM Guests:- DC, SQL, SCCM 2012, CentOS 6.4, NAS, Sharepoint, Sophos UTM, OSD Test (x2), RDP server

A few physical PCs and Laptops as well