Homelab setup Part 1
Homelabing is a big part of how I keep up with the latest tech for my career, over the years I have found that I learn better by actually doing tasks and scenarios instead of just reading or watching videos.
On sysadmin day I posted a picture of my homelab on twitter:
I figured I would do a blog post on the setup.
The lab currently is setup in my basement ( nice and cool down there ), I have a heavy duty shelving rack that I bought from Canadian tire where I setup the two servers that run the lab, mouse and keyboard and the networking gear.
Currently I have two servers for the lab, a Dell poweredge C6100 Server, and a IBM System X3650 M3, I mostly use the IBM one since it`s more power efficient, comes with two xeon processors and 170gigs of ram, for networking I use a Ubiquiti edgeswitch-10x as a core switch and a Edge router-x for the routing.
As the hypervisor I used to use Nutanix, but I was looking for more of a cloud like experience, I settled on Zstack a great opensource cloud software ( more on that on the next blog post ), for monitoring I run Netdata on all my lab base images:
It`s a easy to use and setup monitoring software that you can use and is light on resources ( more on that in the next blog post), they actually just sent me some nice swag :) for SysAdmin day ( Thanks for the swag ).
In the next blog post I will go over the software stack I use in the lab, and the kind of testing and learning I use it for.
Resources: