What constitutes a good home lab setup these days?

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Hi All, I have to hold my hands up that I'm massively out of touch with what constitutes a good home lab these days. In my day it was all about the HP ML's and Micros.

Do any of you have labs at home? What are people going for these days? I've seen some cracking supermicro superservers about but they can get very pricey.

I'm not looking to buy a lab, I wish I could but I've got too much on at the moment. I like hearing what people are using however for their studies.

Cheers
Jim

 

Ditto @Jaron78, all I've got at the moment is this macbook pro with 16gb and VMware fusion for booting up bits and bobs. I wonder how many people studying for certification are getting labs setup at home. Again showing my age, we all would when we were studying for our VCP or MCSE. Possibly people are using hands on labs or similar these days to keep costs low, or just not bothering anymore.

Good work learning Linux by the way mate. I've been playing with CentOS of late, installing LAMP and some basic bits to dust off some cob webs myself

 

Cheers Dave, good to know. What about Docker and Kubernetes and things like this, do you just use Workstation or Fusion or the like on your desktop? I've got docker on this mac but not used it a great deal yet, just for me to learn about containers and docker

 

Thanks Dave. Appreciate your input there as our resident development guru. While I have you and I'm talking about servers, what is your take on serverLESS technologies? Do you see an increasing demand for such things? BaaS and FaaS offerings? I know very little although I was hugely impressed (doesn't take much) when I stumbled upon a website that used wordpress but was serverless using something called shifter

 

I completely agree. The change process and traditional methods for deploying infrastructure can be ridiculously slow. I think virtualisation has played a big part in helping the more streamlined businesses deploy a VM is 30 minutes say, but I also think that containerisation takes this to a whole new level allowing developers to seize back some power from the traditional admins and cut through red tape.
I think that a developer should to a degree not care what it's running on and be able to say, just run my flippin code.

We've got some really cool products that support this sort of development, such as vSphere integrated containers which let do you your thing but also let the admins scale out and monitor resource utilisation of hosts. NSX too which can monitor and secure the traffic coming out of your containers. All cool stuff and more working with you than the traditional ways which I'd imagine as a developer feel like they're working against you

 

I have a few servers in my office for lab work but they are rarely on these days – I have enough spec on my works laptop, which is enough for what I need just now.

Interesting comments on IT departments supporting developers.

The last software development company I supported (Windows 2003\XP time) I got on with well – I created a new internal domain for the developers and gave them their own cabinet so we could try various builds etc. They also got full admin rights etc. and choices of images they could deploy to various servers\PCs etc.

Unfortunately, they got bought out and an internal IT guy started. First thing he did was detach all devices from the developers domain and attached them to the users domain - everyone got locked down so they kept having to speak to him for permission changes and access to the server room etc. The whole process slowed down and but he was sure that this was a better process. I spoke to him when our contract ended and I said there was very small risk at the speed I was making changes for the developers side of the network but with some common sense I did think it was a better approach rather than taking days to process a “change request” or whatever he called it.

 

Sorry I probably took this thread way off topic discussing developers. I don't mean to sound harsh towards infrastructure people as I class myself as one. I just think developers a lot of the time don't want to worry about the platform and want to cut through red tape to get code published faster then traditional change processes can cope with.

Thanks for the lab talk lads. I was boredast night so had a look at some of the older rack servers you can get. Oldish dell and hp servers with tons of ram for buttons. It's just storing and powering those suckers isn't it ha ha

I quite like those nucs. Three on your desk would look smart I reckon although I'd imagine with ram and disks the price goes up fast on those

 

Ah yes fair comment. Those shuttles look pretty cool, is that a cube is it called?

 

Cheers buddy. You've got a good setup there. I know you've invested well in the past. I have a lot of other commitments at the moment, but eventually I think I'll invest in some new hardware. I feel like the odd one out not going for my VCAP and I have access to every product and licence we have so it seems a shame not to make the most of the opportunity

 

I totally know what you mean, I think similar to cloud these days, to a degree buying hardware is a mugs game as it will age, and making aging hardware someone elses problem is definitely the way to go. I think I'm just old, I like own and not rent ha ha. I've recently bought a VPS from SSDNodes that I might migrate this place to, which has re-ignited my interest in such things. If you're selling those NUCs I might be interested mate. Not got a pot to er, ya know, at the moment but never know