Building a Home IT Lab

Course details

Network and system administrators need somewhere to practice their skills, and a home lab is a great choice. In this course, Scott Simpson explains the advantages of a home lab and shows you how to plan and build your own. Scott shows you how to determine what kinds of configurations you’ll need and spec out the hardware needed to support them. He walks you through what services are offered by which kinds of products and explores virtualization options and other tools that are commonly used in home IT labs. Scott covers hands-on examples of building a basic lab with infrastructure solutions such as Hyper-V, Proxmox Virtual Environment, and XCP-ng, as well as desktop solutions such as VirtualBox, KVM, QEMU, and Virtual Machine Manager. By the end of this course, you’ll also be prepared to leverage tools like TrueNAS, Linux containers, and Docker.

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Building a home lab
02 - Why build a home lab
03 - What you should know

1. Designing a Home Lab

04 - What roles do you need to support
05 - Comparing native machines, virtual machines, and containers
06 - How should the network be configured
07 - Lab management and documentation
08 - Planning resources
09 - Home lab hardware

2. Infrastructure Solutions

10 - Get started with Hyper-V
11 - Build a lab with Hyper-V
12 - Get started with Proxmox Virtual Environment
13 - Build a lab with Proxmox Virtual Environment
14 - Get started with XCP-ng
15 - Build a lab with XCP-ng

3. Desktop Solutions

16 - Get started with VirtualBox
17 - Build a lab with VirtualBox
18 - Get started with KVM and QEMU
19 - Build a lab with QEMU
20 - Build a lab with Virtual Machine Manager
21 - Additional options

4. Additional Tools

22 - Get started with TrueNAS Community Edition
23 - Using TrueNAS Community Edition
24 - Get started with Linux containers
25 - Working with Linux containers
26 - Get started with Docker
27 - Working with Docker

Conclusion

28 - Next steps