Building a Home IT Lab

Jony27 · 21 Jun 2018 at 10:27

Hi all, trying to be proactive at work and have the chance to look into Active Directory/Windows server 2012. I want to setup something at home to test a few things with and my question is, what equipment do I need to run a home lab? So far I have done the following

setup a VM on my main machine
installed Windows Server 2012 180day trial
??

What other hardware equipment do I need to separate the computer lab network from our home network?
Can I have the server running on a VM as well as virtualised clients connected to the server?

Sp00n · 21 Jun 2018 at 11:07

You should be able to set up a "virtual network" within the VM software you are using, no additional hardware required. You absolutely can then add client machines as VMs, so long as they are on the same virtual network it should work fine.

What VM software is it?

Jony27 · 21 Jun 2018 at 11:39

Sp00n said:
You should be able to set up a "virtual network" within the VM software you are using, no additional hardware required. You absolutely can then add client machines as VMs, so long as they are on the same virtual network it should work fine.

What VM software is it?

That's great to hear! I am using Oracle's VirtualBox

Would this be a relevant article to follow; http://www.brianlinkletter.com/how-to-use-virtualbox-to-emulate-a-network/

Or do you have any other suggestions?

Scort · 21 Jun 2018 at 13:15

I wanted to do the same, using ESXI as a hypervisor, and then adding vmware machines into that - sadly, having lots of memory isn't the only thing it needed - but lovely quick storage too... which I don't have

If you do have a decent storage setup, maybe some SSDs in RAID0 - then grab yourself the hypervisor and go from there