Sean Massey discusses home lab basics, including why to build a home lab for training, certification preparation, and testing non-production environments. He provides guidelines for building a home lab such as starting small with a hypervisor like Workstation or Fusion, understanding requirements and constraints like budget and space, investing in SSD storage, and obtaining free or low-cost software and operating systems. Methods for stocking a lab include buying new, used, or building your own systems, and using cloud options for some learning workloads.

1. Home Lab Basics:
The Why’s and How’s
Sean Massey
Faith Technologies
Blog: http://seanmassey.net
Twitter: @seanpmassey

2. About Me
 Systems Administrator at Faith Technologies in Appleton, WI
 Not with VMware. That is an error on the schedule
 Blog at seanmassey.net
 Currently focus on VMware View and desktop virtualization
 Have had a home lab in some form for almost 10 years
 First generation lab was an old AMD Athlon 800 Mhz whitebox running Windows
Server
 Today’s lab is three servers and Fibre Channel attached storage
 On Twitter: @seanpmassey

3. What is a Home Lab?
A collection of computer hardware and
software that is used for learning

4. Why Build A Home Lab?
 Training/Continuing Education
 Technical Positions Require 10 hours of continuing education per week to stay
current – IEEE Spectrum (September 2013)
 Mike Laverick - “The days of being sent on training courses is gone. The burden is
now on you to get the skills and knowledge you need. It is assumed you will learn
as you go.” – The Register (February 2013)
 Certification Preparation
 Advanced certs like VCAP Administrator exams and CCIE have hands-on components
 Testing Things You Can’t Do In A Production Environment
 What happens if I turn off large page support or remove a LUN with running VMs?

5. How To Build A Home Lab
Components of a Home Lab
 Compute – ESXi or system running Workstation/Fusion
 Storage – Local, physical NAS or FreeNAS/OpenFiler/Nexenta/etc.
 Network
 Workloads – Things to run in the lab
Hypervisors can be virtualized too!

6. How To Build A Home Lab
 Understand Your Requirements and Constraints
 Biggest Constraints will be budget and time
 Other Constraints include space, power, cooling
 Don’t lock yourself into today’s goals
 Start Small
 Labs can be expensive
 Hard to go from no lab to complex lab
 Consider using Workstation or Fusion at first – VCPs get Workstation license
 Be Creative
 Have Fun

7. How To Build A Home Lab
General Guidelines:
 Most Processors built in last 3-5 years should run vSphere
 Look for processors with virtualization extensions built in – VT-D and EPT (Intel) or
AMD-V and AMD RVI (AMD)
 Don’t Mix and Match AMD/Intel in same cluster
 Threads vs. Cores vs. Sockets
 Memory can be biggest constraint – minimum recommended is at least
32GB for compute cluster
 Memory Requirements will only go up
 Understand system’s max memory and number of slots
 Invest in some SSD
 When Buying Used, Caveat Emptor!

8. Stocking the Lab
Three Methods for getting equipment
 Buying New or Certified Used
 Dell, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro
 Dell Outlet for slightly used but vendor certified gear
 Buy Used
 eBay/Craigslist
 Electronics recyclers
 Employer*
 Build Your Own

9. Stocking the Lab
 Operating Systems
 Microsoft – MSDN subscription or trials only avenue for testing
servers in lab
 Linux/Unix – Free
 vSphere – vSphere Free Hypervisor or 60-day trials of all software
 AutoLab – vSphere Lab Automation labguides.com/autolab/
 Software
 Free and/or open source for workloads
 Low cost lab editions – ie F5 load balancer
 Trials
 Not-For-Resale programs for Microsoft/VMware certified pros

10. What About The Cloud?
 Two types of Clouds
 Training Specific Cloud Options –VMware HOL
 General Cloud – Azure, AWS, Rackspace
 General Cloud
 Cost based on usage
 Great for learning workloads and cloud skills
 VMware Hands-On-Lab Great Resource for targeted learning
 Free
 Only training resource for NSX

11. Resources
 Websites:
 Serve The Home – servethehome.com
 Autolab - labguides.com/autolab/
 Bloggers:
 Chris Wahl – wahlnetwork.com
 Erik Bussink – bussink.ch
 William Lam – virtuallyghetto.com
 Robert Novak - rsts11.com/poho-home-lab/
 Simon Gallagher (vTardis) – vinf.net/vTardis
 Twitter:
 Great Resource for Questions about Equipment