I live in Perth WA (Western Australia), and work in IT. Perth is a beautiful place and as per the posts about my trip to the far North West of the state, it is pretty vast area, and largely untouched. This is one of the reasons I love living here, however it brings me to the tyranny of distance. My work lab is in Sydney, and due to the sometimes flaky internet connection I have at home, this can cause me problems in access and working in the lab. So I’ve decided to build my home lab from the odd bits and pieces that I have picked up over the years. The point of the lab is to run an environment that will allow me to deploy new software and see how it goes. The first step though is to build it from scratch.
Back to Physical
The physical components of the lab are essentially old bits of kit that I’ve had lying around for years, cobbled together on a shoestring budget.
Every IT environment is made up the same core components, Storage, Compute, and Network, with additional components such as the rack it is all in, UPS, physical security and so on. As this is a home lab I’ll be focussing on the core components, and will outline the future growth plans in a later article.
Compute
The Compute section of the lab is essentially a desktop PC that has had an Intel NIC added to provide connectivity options. I have two of these boxes and so far so good. I’d like to add more “servers” and as a result I’m keeping an eye on some old desktop PCs that I should be able to finagle and then repurpose as ESXi hosts.
These are pretty low spec desktop boxes with a single CPU and 32GB RAM per box, however I should be able to get a few VMs on each one.
Network
I’d love to say my network is made up of some cool things, the reality is though that it is a 8 port Gigabit Ethernet switch from Netgear and does the job that I need it to do at the moment. I’d love to get hold of a managed L3 switch in the future, but this will do for now.
Storage
Ah storage, the bane of my home lab. I purchased an Iomega PX4 NAS from EMC when they owned the brand. I added some 2TB drives to it, and have had nothing but problems with it. I’d love to replace this box but until it goes the way of the Dodo I won’t get a replacement approved by the Minister of Finance.
Finally there is the keyboard, video, and mouse, again made up of old kit that still works. All of the above live under the stairs on a set of repurposed adjustable shelves, which work for the moment, and due to the space issues I have, will probably stay there.