home lab

  • Supermicro fanless models for quiet home lab servers

    Best Quiet Home Server in 2022 for Virtualization

    Running a home lab is an investment and certainly comes with the cost of equipment, including servers, networking gear, storage, and ancillary devices. However, a cost that is part of running a home lab is electricity, aka power. Power costs…

  • Integration of virtual firewalls such as Palo Alto VM series with VMware NSX T

    Virtual firewall vs Physical firewall in the home lab

    So, in thinking about the direction of where my home lab is headed, I find myself using less and less discrete physical devices as opposed to running things as virtual machines. As a topic of interest for my home lab…

  • Kubernetes cluster running in the home lab in 2022

    Virtualization vs Containerization in 2022 home lab

    I have been revisiting many of the infrastructure components and services running in the home lab environment. You can read my VMware Home Lab and Learning Goals 2022 post to see a few of the specific learning objectives that I…

  • IBM Lenovo P620 Ryzen Threadripper

    VMware Home Lab and Learning Goals 2022

    As we are beginning to wrap up the 2021 year, like me, you may be starting to think about the year ahead and what technologies and other skills you would like to develop. What is on your plate for the…

  • After installing the TPM in Supermicro verifying it is enabled

    Add a TPM card to VMware vSAN Host

    Security is an extremely important part of server technology these days. With the sophistication of malicious attacks, supply chain hacks, and other risks to business-critical data, security contains several layers of protection. Security not only must be applied to software…

  • Multiple hosts with VLAN trunking on a physical network switch with gateway forwarding next hop

    VMware Home Lab Network Design

    Many of us run VMware home labs and these no doubt have many different architectures and hardware configurations across the entire landscape, and that is great! There is no one single way to configure a home lab the “right way”…

  • Creating a vSAN network in VMware Workstation

    vSAN Lab on VMware Workstation: Step-by-Step

    Home labs comes in many shapes and sizes. One of the first types of labs that many are able to invest in is running VMware Workstation on top of a workstation PC or even a laptop. VMware Workstation is a…

  • Creating a new conditional forwarder in Microsoft DNS server

    DNS Conditional Forwarder Multiple Internal Domains Setup

    I do a lot of work in the home lab environment and this includes building up Active Directory domains for various types of testing and building out of test environments. If you do build out different environments for testing and…

  • Vmware workstation pro is a great option for a home lab environment on a budget

    Copy VMware Workstation VM to ESXi: Home Lab

    When it comes to building your first home lab, there is nothing wrong with starting out with VMware Workstation. Realistically, this may be all you need. Having a decent workstation or laptop with a good bit of RAM running VMware…

  • Nested-ESXi-lab-environment-with-stretched-vSAN-cluster-with-Witness-host

    Nested ESXi Lab Build Networking and Hardware

    Many who are learning VMware vSphere and those who may already work with VMware vSphere products each and every day benefit from having a lab environment. I have always been a proponent of lab environments. Even with many touting moving…