Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?
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@FiyaFly said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
@Dashrender said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
@FiyaFly said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
It's not AS cheap, but I'd consider doing this on Vultr or Digital Ocean instead. Will look way more professional and give you even better experience. And for two systems, you can do it for $10/mo.
I was considering going hosted, but right now I need to actually do some tuning to my budget to figure out when I can buy a domain name and have it forward to my IP...
@scottalanmiller said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
@JaredBusch said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
Just do not expect to actually perform any VM backups with Veeam on VMWare free. You can do agent backups, but not VM level.
Good point, the free Veeam agent would work fine, but not normal Veeam. Not the Veeam that companies are looking for.
Very true, however, read above on budget. I am going to be doing some training in Veeam, and want at least something to practice with, even if it doesn't offer full functionality.
The free stand alone version doesn't work anything like the paid product though, not really.
Then I guess this would be my secondary question- would it be worth building a lab with it at all? If it's nothing like paid, it sounds like I won't really benefit from learning to use it.
Correct, from the perspective that your next employer uses the paid product, using the free product offers you next to nothing, if not nothing.
I agree with Scott here, going pure hosting for the things you listed is probably best.
Webservers with very rare exception should be hosted at some service - get that thing out of your own network at almost any cost. One less way for attackers to attack your network.
Learning ESXi is still OK, but learning Hyper-V and XenServer are equally important because the lower (i.e. no) cost they offer.
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If you want a home lab, I'd setup a hypervisor and install linux as an AD box and join a local workstation to it, and play with GPOs, printers, etc. This will teach you how you can help a company migrate away from a Windows domain setup to a Linux AD setup, save some costs, etc.
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@Dashrender said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
Learning ESXi is still OK, but learning Hyper-V and XenServer are equally important because the lower (i.e. no) cost they offer.
The discussion is around Veeam, not VMWare.
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@FiyaFly said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
Sweet. The hardware I'm using is literally my old PC from 2011.
Make sure it has virtualization support and the NIC is supported. I've had to try to inject NIC drivers in to ESXi to get the NIC working in a desktop when I did something similar to what you're doing some years ago.
I now have a HP Proliant DL360 and DL160 sitting under my desk. The 360 has 32GB of RAM. I think I paid $125 for it and then picked up some 300GB SAS drives on ebay for $25 each. There are a couple of downsides, it's noisy and it's power hungry. I picked up a Belkin watt meter, and it would cost me $200 a year to keep it powered on. With that said, I generally do a build that lasts a few days to a week and shut it off when I'm not working on it.
I think you can get eval versions of VMware that will let you test versions without the restrictions of the free version. The problem is, you can't do much with that little RAM. I think the vSphere appliance takes up 4GB itself. You might not need the vSphere appliance to do what you're going to do.
You could test a bit with HyperV and Veeam. That would probably be the easiest thing to do with the hardware you have although it wouldn't take long to try to load ESXi on it and see if everything works.
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@Mike-Davis said in [Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed H
I now have a HP Proliant DL360 and DL160 sitting under my desk.
Damn that has to be loud!
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@Dashrender said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
Damn that has to be loud!
They are not powered on much for that reason.
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@Dashrender said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
This will teach you how you can help a company migrate away from a Windows domain setup to a Linux AD setup, save some costs, etc.
If your goal is to learn how to do that, it's cool. OTOH if you're trying to learn how to support clients that have nothing but windows and no desire to go to Linux for AD, you might as well learn the platform your customers are using.
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@Mike-Davis said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
@Dashrender said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
This will teach you how you can help a company migrate away from a Windows domain setup to a Linux AD setup, save some costs, etc.
If your goal is to learn how to do that, it's cool. OTOH if you're trying to learn how to support clients that have nothing but windows and no desire to go to Linux for AD, you might as well learn the platform your customers are using.
True enough.
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A lot of it depends on where you live (how much you pay for utilities). My DL380 averages around 175W of power consumption. I have ~ 14-15 VMs running (average, depends on what I'm working on/testing). So it costs me about $115 a year for electricity. Or about the cost of 2 small DO or Vultr servers per month.
My 380 is really quiet. It's a G6, which is rated at 22/28 dbA. It's quieter than my one desktop that I'm using as a NAS.
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If it is VMware you want to learn, check out the free Hands on Labs (hol.vmware.com). I was told by someone at a VMUG (VMware User Group) that you can put infrastructure you have created in a lab environment on a resume and that if you can do it in the lab environment you can do it in production. There are also some VMware product walk throughs out there that I think are helpful - https://featurewalkthrough.vmware.com/.
Look for a local VMware User Group to you. Go and talk to the people in that group, and ask them how they got to where they are today. There are also Veeam User Groups around the country too. Again, this is a great place to get product specific knowledge and advice from those who use the technology daily.
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If you had another station (whether laptop or desktop) or maybe a very small VM on what will be your host, consider installing Starwind's virtual SAN (just on the one box). It's a way to get yourself some experience with how VMware or another hypervisor interacts with iSCSI storage. I've used it in a lab before, and it worked great.
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@NetworkNerd said in Home Lab, Multiple Servers on Repurposed Hardware- Feasible?:
If you had another station (whether laptop or desktop) or maybe a very small VM on what will be your host, consider installing Starwind's virtual SAN (just on the one box). It's a way to get yourself some experience with how VMware or another hypervisor interacts with iSCSI storage. I've used it in a lab before, and it worked great.
We have that on top of the Scale cluster in the lab. Starwind SAN on top of the HC3 works great.
