How to Build a Home lab
Practical advice and discussion on software & hardware options
Have you ever wanted to replicate a more complex IT environment and your laptop’s CPU, memory, or disk wasn’t enough? Or maybe you thought of building a scaled-down cluster to test a distributed system, to experiment with a high-availability scenario, or to see if your failover design really works, all in the convenience of your home office?
In this piece, I’ll discuss the components you need to build your own home lab and suggest three different implementations of increasing complexity and cost.
The basic components of a home lab
Before we start with different configurations and options let’s define the main components we may need in all different setups:
Computing power
This is the main horsepower of your lab and consists of the physical server and CPU(s) you intend to use. The more physical processors the better, as well as the more CPU cores too.
Memory
The amount of memory (RAM) your labs makes available for use is an intrinsic component of your lab. Unless you run specific workloads, you may be surprised to find out that the total amount of RAM in your lab can be more important than the amount of computing power you…
