Building a Home IT Lab

Explore how to plan and build your own home lab to practice your IT administration skills.

Introduction

• Building a home lab
• Why build a home lab?

1. Designing a Home Lab

• What roles do you need to support?
• Native vs. virtual machines vs. containers
• How should the network be configured?
• Lab management and documentation
• Planning resources
• Home lab hardware

2. Type 1 Hypervisors

• Exploring Hyper-V
• Building a lab with Hyper-V
• Exploring ESXi
• Installing ESXi
• Building a lab with ESXi
• Exploring Proxmox Virtual Environment
• Installing Proxmox Virtual Environment
• Building a lab with Proxmox Virtual Environment
• Exploring QEMU and KVM
• Building a lab with QEMU and KVM

3. Type 2 Hypervisors

• Exploring VirtualBox
• Building a lab with VirtualBox
• Exploring VMware Workstation or Fusion
• Building a lab with VMware apps

4. Other Tools

• Exploring TrueNAS CORE
• Installing TrueNAS CORE
• Using TrueNAS CORE
• Exploring LXC containers
• Building a lab with LXC containers
• Exploring Docker
• Building a lab with Docker

Conclusion

• Next steps