Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee is the Senior Writer, Engineer and owner at Virtualizationhowto.com, and a 7-time VMware vExpert, with over two decades of experience in Information Technology. Having worked for numerous Fortune 500 companies as well as in various industries, He has extensive experience in various IT segments and is a strong advocate for open source technologies. Brandon holds many industry certifications, loves the outdoors and spending time with family. Also, he goes through the effort of testing and troubleshooting issues, so you don't have to.

home lab

Brandon LeeMay 6, 2025
4 1,043

Checkmate Monitoring for Free Open Source Docker Solution for Uptime Monitoring

I am always on the lookout for great new open-source tools for monitoring and management in the home lab and in production environments. I am a huge fan of Uptime Kuma as a monitoring solution, and other tools like Prometheus…
Mini PC & Server

Brandon LeeMay 5, 2025
2 2,365

GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus Review as a Home Lab Server

Many home lab enthusiasts or those that want to get into a home lab are looking for low power options to minimize the spend on running a lab server. Enterprise gear might be found for cheap on eBay or elsewhere,…
home lab

Brandon LeeMay 1, 2025
5 2,610

Minisforum N5 Pro NAS might replace our home lab servers with AI storage?

I have to say that this is one that I am really excited about. The Minisforum N5 Pro NAS will be Minisforum’s first foray into the NAS world. However, they are already very adept with hardware that is both cutting…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 30, 2025
0 942

Home Lab Explorers School for learning Proxmox DevOps Kubernetes and more!

There are so many great resources out on the Internet to learn about things, especially now with AI. However, the sense of community is also an important aspect of learning and staying motivated. I have been working to share my…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 29, 2025
2 1,267

Ultimate Guide to Building a 2.5GbE Home Lab Network in 2025

When it comes to networking, 1 gig networking is becoming “long in the tooth”. There have been many advancements in the networking field, especially getting to 2.5 GbE as a very mainstream standard. In this guide, we will take a…
Computers

Brandon LeeApril 28, 2025
0 455

Spring Cleaning Your Home Lab with 5 Ways to Optimize and Save Resources

Every spring many like to take a look around the house and see things they could get rid of, donate, or just downsize. This is usually beneficial and keeps things tidy and much better organized. But, what about home labs?…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 25, 2025
0 1,583

NAS vs Virtual SAN vs Ceph: What’s the Best Storage for Your Home Lab?

One of the critical design decisions that you have with a home lab is storage. There are many great options available. And, depending on a few things, like which hypervisor you use, you can choose from a wide range of…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 24, 2025
0 742

Home Lab Security: 5 Threats You’re Not Watching (But Should Be)

Running your home lab is a tremendously good resource for learning. It allows you to get your hands on many different technologies and experiment with these in a way that would not be possible otherwise. However, Most who spin up…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 23, 2025
2 2,171

Killer Home Lab Projects You Can Build in a Weekend

I think that learning in the home lab is best accomplished by having your learning be project-based. When you have a project that actually benefits you in the home lab environment, it accelerates your learning as you are actually attacking…
home lab

Brandon LeeApril 22, 2025
0 1,757

Top 5 Tools I Use to Manage My Home Lab in 2025

In running a home lab, you will spin up numerous resources, including containers, virtual machines, networks, and many other types of components that comprise self-hosting your services. Certain tools make managing all of these different components and resources much easier.…