I have a large computer and networking home lab where I keep my technical skills sharp and play with new ideas. I use this for most of my engineering projects, getting hands on on new learning opportunities, and some interesting home automation ideas.
Here are just some of the hardware and projects I have in there today:
Physical Hardware
- 2 ESXi White box Servers- each with 8 cores, 32 GB memory, 1-3 TB local storage
- 2 Proxmox Servers on HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini, 4 Cores, 24GB Memory, 1TB SSD Local storage
- NetGear 104 NAS Server, 9 TB storage
- QNAP TS-459 NAS Server, 9 TB storage
- Ubiquiti routers (2)
- Dell 5248 GB Smart Switch
- Dell 5224 GB Smart Switch
- Dell 5324 GB Smart Switch
- 3 Cisco 2500 Series Routers
- Cisco 1700 and 2600 Routers
- 4 UPS Battery Backups,
- Several Raspberry Pi’s
- Several Win 10 Laptops and desktops along with Macs and Linux servers
- Original Prusa MINI+ 3D Printer
Virtual Devices
- Windows servers (2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016)
- Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, Puppy, CentOS)
- VMware ESXi Servers (5.1, 5.5, 6.0, 6.5)
- VMware vCenter, vRA, Log Insight, VUM, NSX
- Windows Active Directory, DNS
- Pi-Hole, Nagios, Cacti, PRTG, MS SQL, Syslog, NTP
Virtual devices change weekly. I use trial versions of all software and rebuild things often.
I am also playing with Azure and AWS and linking those networks with my own. Since my goal is to keep the costs down, I am limiting what public cloud devices I run and only have a budget of about $100 in my public cloud resources.
Programming
I have written several hundred scripts and small programs over the years and in the process of organizing them in one place. I have 4 GitHub libraries, a OneDrive, and several archives that I need to go through. I plan to remove anything old, no longer needed, or out-dated and move the rest to my public GitHub repository.
I plan to move my 3 IBM private GitHub libraries to my private GitHub Site. Let me know if you have any questions on any of them
Workshop
I also have a fully functional workshop in my garage. I can do just about any woodworking or mechanical project (Pictures coming soon). This in additional to the 3D printer and soon CNC router I will never want to leave the house.