Home Lab

In an attempt to help me prove new network related stuff and, in some instances prove solutions before offering it up in a design document, I’ve been putting together a home lab.

I spent a while skimming eBay looking for second-hand servers and eventually settled upon a Dell Power Edge R715. This particular one came with an AMD 6272 processor at 2.1Ghz (16 cores), 128GB of Ram and just under a TB of SAS 10k disk space, but there are some sellers (I found my on eBay) that will spec the server how you want it – at a cost of course. I paid £250 delivered for mine, which was a pretty good deal.

I did have (still may) plans to utilise some other hardware I had lying around:

• x2 Cisco 3750G switches
• Cisco ASA 5510 firewal

But, as I play around with, i.e. break/reboot the kit frequently I didn’t want to suffer the wrath of an angry family member that can’t access Netflix or play Angry Birds :).

The setup is really nice and simple at the moment and it means I can hop over the internet onto VMWare ESXi and build/test/break stuff without any problems.