Home Lab
IT is important to do some tests to underlying concept of IT systems. Therefore, best option is to prepare your own home lab. You may need to tweak your system after a while such as adding ram, SSD disk. Hold on , it is not expensive. It will boost your knowledge like a rocket. Lets started.
Step 1. Buy a Server
HP or Dell, buy a second hand. Don’t buy an obsolete one, otherwise you may not install something or upgrade it. I bought HP G7, Generation 7, as a second hand. You can find it from ebay or amazon etc.
Add some disks on it. You do not to be more professional. However, it is good to engage with RAID configuration, as shown below. You can also buy second hand SSD and harddisk. I used 256 GB SSD for my ESXI host, 5×146 GB SAS disks which were configured as HP raid configuration( RAID 5), and 1 TB SSD for vms, since they need more IOs.
Step 2. Virtualisation - VMware
Use any kind of it VMware or Hyper-V. Stick to one of the industry leaders. You can use a trial version to test your IT lab. I used Hyper-V, however, VMware is a good competitor. You can download VMware iso file and deploy by using a USB disk or remote connection. There are tons of example on youtube channel. Download ILO integrated Remote Console.
Upload your images, virtual machines which you deploy before in somewhere. For examples, after creating a virtual machines on my vmware workstation, I transferred it into VMware ESXI server. It is an optional. You may need to play around it, shown below.
Step 3. Storage and Veeam Backup
You can buy a Storage Area Network(SAN) or Network Area Server(NAS). In these day, a small NAS server can be useful to store data and backup. Do not underestimate backup mindset. It is important whatever your job is. Take your backup. In this example, I tested one of server set up on VMWare ESXI.
You may use any other virtualization, backup software, tools, devices. Veembackup will be another post. You can start with trial version and watching this useful video, below. Enjoy.