I generally don't make improvements to my lab environment at home unless I am working on a project where I need to learn something or I anticipate needing to be able to speak to something at a customer environment. The only major improvement I've made to it in quite a few years was getting SCCM working for patching and inventorying all my VMs. I hadn't patched them in years (literally). They're now all up to date and such. Given I have dozens of them it's actually kind of nice having a picture of where things stand sometimes. For the most part everything is a disaster in terms of config, best practice, etc. I actually don't mind this as when I toss a script on there to test it usually will smoke out some error conditions that aren't uncommon in a customer environment.
I've been using the thing for years now though so over time I've just continued to add stuff to it and let it evolve. It's pretty rare that I'm sitting at home on a weekend or whatever and decide to go mess with any of this stuff or try and improve it less I'm working on work. Thanks, Brian Desmond br...@briandesmond.com w - 312.625.1438 | c - 312.731.3132 From: Sean Martin [mailto:seanmarti...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2011 1:42 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OTish? - Building a home lab from scratch A little late to the show here. You've gotten some some really good advice. I'll just add that it is very easy to start small and grow from there. I bought a Dell studio PC a little over a year ago for under $800. It came with two 750GB sata drives in a RAID 0 (not great for redundancy, but I've got backups of my critical data) and 8GB RAM. For about $100, I picked up a VT capable processor from Newegg which allowed me to host 64bit VMs (using VMWare server 2.0). My only intent for using Virtualization was to build the necessary environments for training. I've got DCs, Exchange 2010, Forefront, WSUS and a couple of Windows Client VMs. I'll admit things start to crawl while they're all running simultaneously, but it has served my needs quite well. Unfortunately, I was pretty amped when I was originally setting everything up. After a few weeks of actually using it for study/training purposes, the novelty wore off. That probably speaks more to my own lack of discipline, but I just wanted to throw that out there because the last thing you want to do is throw a bunch of time, energy and money into a test lab that will go unused. As of others have pointed out, life takes priority, and it's a lot more fun :) - Sean On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 11:24 AM, Jonathan <ncm...@gmail.com<mailto:ncm...@gmail.com>> wrote: Carpentry, huh? Well, my boss is a Jewish carpenter. ;-) Thanks for the input, everyone. This definitely helps me to put things into perspective. As for being "ashamed", well, ASB picked up on the intended hyperbole. I have much ?better? things of which to actually be ashamed! I haven't had the burning desire or time to work with a home lab in the past, but definitely need to, and now is the time. The office is not conducive to a test environment, and the way things are these days, who knows how much longer %work% will be there. If I decide to branch out on my own, I need a test environment. Building such while being employed is much easier to do financially, as opposed to the alternative. On a more technical note, ASB - why specifically did you recommend that particular model Netgear over Linksys or anything else? Brian - curious, what brand/model is your external SATA cage? I don't know why I didn't think about a TechNet subscription (*headdesk*) - I have one at work. Duh. Thanks for the reminder. I even found a discount code online for TechNet Pro (no media) that knocked $88 off! Steven - multiple good points about documentation and 'real' servers being LOUD compared to desktops. I need to learn more about multiplicity, and I had not heard of Virtual Box. I'll have to read up on that as well. Again, thanks to EVERYONE for your input. I really appreciate it. Jonathan On Jan 13, 2011 1:10 PM, "Jonathan Link" <jonathan.l...@gmail.com<mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com>> wrote: ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
