Technologies change everyday, as an IT consultant you must be aware of these changes as must as possible.
You have to build, crash, migrate, test, understand how products works.
Homelabing is the key.
Here some questions that you should answer before starting:
– What you already have?
– On premise ? Cloud ?
– Long term investment
– Noise
– Electricity Consumption
– Room space
– And maybe the most important, WAF : the Wife Acceptance Factor.
For me, i started to build my homelab many years ago, my concerns were Electricity consumption and noise.
I started with my gamer laptop, a NUC and a Synology DS214SE, below where i’m now:
I’m still using NUC, but 6 now, n+1 is the key.
I moved from the DS214Se with magnetic disks to a DS416 with 4 512Gb Samsung Pro SSD.
Near my Internet box with a powerful network connection (500MB/s down, 200MB/s up which allow me to easily connect to my homelab from the internet)
Regarding performance, you should be concern in first by RAM, IOPS and last point will be CPU perf’.
This is why i choose the D34010WYK model with a little i3 processor.
Here the summary of my NUC cluster in the vCenter:
I have many cool others functionality that i want to develop in my homelab, which will be nice subjects for this blog in the future.
To end if you want to check more about my homelab, you can find on the right of my blog a little plugin which display some cool informations about it. Thanks to Sean Duffy for this nice plugin.
See you,
