Home Lab worth it?

[penfold]

My last few roles have had me work more on applications with limited access to test environments. For the last few years, I have mainly relied on my home PC to spin up some VM to practice setting new systems up/changing configs etc. In my current job now, it seems there will be no access to any "management" of systems but will be solely focused Operations using the applications. As a result I am looking at setting something up again at home so I can continue to learn and not forget how things work. My own PC is getting old and only has 12GB RAM which is soon eaten up when you spin up a couple of machines. My question is, are home labs still worth it? I've seen there are options using Cloud based learning labs, but I've also seen that people have been bitten by high costs by using more than they intended.

 

The way I see it, is if I look into home lab I could either buy extra memory to be able to continue using my own PC or I could look into a home server which could be used as a learning lab, but also some home storage to replace/increase my current full NAS drive.

 

Does anyone still use a Home Lab? Thoughts, feedback?

[pete]

I still have one (Synology and a couple of ultra-small form factor desktops).

 

It doesn't get powered up as much these days (sufficient spare capacity at work to run a dev environment when needed), but occasionally I'll spot something interesting that I wouldn't otherwise get the chance to play with and spin it up for a couple of hours.

[supportman]

I just use VM's at work now.

[chaplic]

I have a PC with 64GB of RAM and 4 SSDs in it with 3 AD domains, 2 Azure AD connects, SQL, ADFS, reverse proxy, VPN windows 10 devices and a free Office365 tenant for developers and a job lot of odds and sods. Id thoroughly recommend it and think its actually more relevant now. back in the day if you were dealing with SANs and high bandwidth it wasn't feasible.

 

The first few VMs on it were actually pulled from Azure as it was getting pricey/ I was forgetful and lazy in switching things off and/or right-sizing

[penfold]

Thanks all, I have no access to any VMs at work for this kind of thing unfortunately. It also looks like this wont change in the future (at least in my role). I did think I could buy some memory for my PC and if I do decide to get a dedicated server, I can swap out the memory (checking compatibility first of course)

[penfold]

My computer is older than I remember. Just checked the Max RAM and found it is 16GB:doh: I guess I would probably be better of looking for a new computer with lots of RAM to run VMs? For now, I will just have to limit what I want to do until I decide what to get.

[Katy]

I have some bits in Azure but also recently updated my home server to be more of a home lab - there's a few 2019 VMs on there which do file, print, DNS, DHCP etc for the home network. So I looked into the best way to get a decent amount of RAM, while not really needing all that much CPU, and the answer was "gaming PC". I went for 11th gen i7, 128GB RAM and it's currently got 4 x 4TB SAS drives on a SAS RAID controller. Plenty of capacity for the base load of the few 2019 VMs and I can run another 10 VMs at the same time if I want to. At the time PayPal Credit was doing a 4 year 0% interest instalments thing, so I put it on that. Costs me about £15 a month for the next 4 years.

[Aprice]

I've got a couple of R620s with 128GB in each for when we need to test something strenuous. They are now becoming a bit of a problem because of their age / VMware support, lack of HBAs e.t.c and the noise / power.

 

For day to day testing my PC has 32GB of RAM and an i5 in so runs VMware Workstation when I need to test something out and don't want to fire up the Dells. It ran a 3 node Storage Spaces Cluster the other day with no issues.