Home setups for self training and testing

[bondbill2k2]

After the recent home lab HP microserver thread I didnt want to hijack too much so i've made this new thread, what would people recommend as a basic setup for testing and learning at home. My current school may be a little behind the times and the way our budget is going we won't be going for the virtual setup this year either, i'd like to begin teaching myself abit about the likes of Hyper-v and 08r2 server setup myself having only worked in an already setup and configured network environment. Having free roam to test and try things out at home till my heart content im sure will greatly benefit myself and my work as a result but trying not to pick up any bad habits

 

Would anyone be able to recommend a relatively cheap home setup or maybe even some setups people currently have.

[Davit2005]

It will definately benefit trying and testing things at home, you could try and use official training materials so you learn the official way without any bad habits.

 

I've been through a few virtual configurations of labs at home starting with Virtual PC, then moved to Virtual Server 2005, then started to play with VMWare ESXi.

 

My lab consists of a couple of cheap 2nd hand Cisco routers (2600), 2nd hand HP 1800 switch, 2nd hand cisco 2900 switch and a HP ML115 server running ESXi4.1 with multiple network cards.

Edited March 26, 2012 by Davit2005

[bondbill2k2]

Just found an old 2950 I may be able to acquire for personal use here