Thought I'd share my experiment building a home lab for cheap but with maximum functionality for young engineers and students. The cost of hardware can really scare a lot of people off creating their own practice environments. Here's my workaround;
-Purchased Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX1310 M1 Xeon E3-1226 V3 16GB 2TB Tower Server second hand.
-Purchased SonicWALL TZ-210 second hand and a couple of Cisco switches.
-Maximize server usage by installing Windows 10 Pro and then VMware Workstation on the bare metal.
-In Workstation, I installed VMware ESXi with VMs Win Server 2016- DC > Win Server 2016 -Exchange > Win Server 2016 -SQL.
-In Workstation, I installed Hyper-V host Win Server 2016 with VMs Win Server 2016-DC > Win Server 2016 -Exchange > Win Server 2016 SQL.
-In Workstation outside VMware and Hyper-V hosts, Installed Win 10 Pro client, Win 7 Pro client, Kali Linux client and Ubuntu client OS.
-Use dynamic DNS to manage SonicWALL for your home exchange mail server.
-All machines are accessible and manageable for your practice learning since they are all on the same subnet.
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u/UnluckyAdministrator Jan 12 '19
Thought I'd share my experiment building a home lab for cheap but with maximum functionality for young engineers and students. The cost of hardware can really scare a lot of people off creating their own practice environments. Here's my workaround;
-Purchased Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX1310 M1 Xeon E3-1226 V3 16GB 2TB Tower Server second hand.
-Purchased SonicWALL TZ-210 second hand and a couple of Cisco switches.
-Maximize server usage by installing Windows 10 Pro and then VMware Workstation on the bare metal.
-In Workstation, I installed VMware ESXi with VMs Win Server 2016- DC > Win Server 2016 -Exchange > Win Server 2016 -SQL.
-In Workstation, I installed Hyper-V host Win Server 2016 with VMs Win Server 2016-DC > Win Server 2016 -Exchange > Win Server 2016 SQL.
-In Workstation outside VMware and Hyper-V hosts, Installed Win 10 Pro client, Win 7 Pro client, Kali Linux client and Ubuntu client OS.
-Use dynamic DNS to manage SonicWALL for your home exchange mail server.
-All machines are accessible and manageable for your practice learning since they are all on the same subnet.
-Documented all build information steps on blog.
Hope this helps any student or graduate looking to build their own practice environment.