Home Lab

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have started building a home lab. And by started I literally mean I've got a single NUC (Which I picked up for a bargain price off eBay) and I've installed ESXi on it. I currently only have a couple of Linux VM's running at the moment, one of which hosts this website. Eventually though I plan on buying a few more NUC's or other micro PC's as long as they can support up to 64Gb of RAM, and purchasing a VMUG license so that I can lab a whole lot more including some more VMWare products like VCentre Server, NSX and Avi Load Balancers. 

I do actually quite like this little NUC i picked up though, It's quite a powerful little box for the $200 I paid for it, it's a quad core i5 which gives a total of 8 threads and supports Gen3 M2 SSD drives. The only downside is that it only supports a maximum of 32Gb of RAM which is very limiting when it comes to VMWare products. (I've since found out that I can put 64GB in this little thing). This is why I've used this particular NUC for hosting servers and will eventually host a GNS3 VM. 

While I've currently only got a couple of Linux VM's, mainly due to lack of RAM (16GB) I was pretty quick to purchase more RAM to increase it to 32Gb which will allow me to run a few extra VM's. I picked up some RAM off amazon that is probably the cheapest I've seen. Click here to check out the Amazon store.  Once I get the extra RAM, my plan is to spin up a GNS3 VM appliance and test that out. I've used GNS3 quite a lot for labbing before but thought if I can get it on a VM why not give that a crack. I have a 24 port Cisco 3560x switch and an 1100 series swouter (Router with a built in 8 port switch) sitting at home for labbing switching content as I plan to re-certify for my CCNP eventually so the addition of a GNS3 VM that can do routing will be great. The Cisco 1100 series also has a built in Mobility Express WLC which will help with the Wireless component of the CCNP and I also have a few 1142 AP's laying around that I can use to lab the Autonomous AP stuff. I should also be able to add on a few very lightweight Linux VM's for Hosts in the LAB environment too on my NUC. I'm planning on using LUbuntu but thought i might give Puppy Linux a go as well given it's an extremely lightweight distro requiring only 300Mb of disk space and 256Mb of RAM and this is really just for Host connectivity in a Lab. 

I'm also wanting to delve into some NSX-T (Now called NSX) stuff as well. Given I will be using this at work it's one of those things that I will need to know and need to learn so and the best way I find to learn is by doing so thought I would document the process as well and add it to this site once I do. Once i get enough $$$ to purchase at least a couple more micro PC's that support 64Gb of RAM and a few additional SSD's/NICs for them I'll start delving into more NSX/VMWare and writing articles about that.