Build an I.T. Homelab in 2020 | My Homelab Equipment

I've been getting a lot of requests for the specific details on my home lab so in this video we're gonna take a tour let's go [Music] I've been seeing it pop up more and more and more and more what are you using to study for all of your lab preparations what is this specific hardware that you're using to run even G so I took a poll on Twitter and asked if you would be interested in actually seeing the stuff that I have and then on top of that I asked if you would be interested in having links directly to the stuff so if you check out in the description below you can follow along so to speak those are affiliate links and I'll talk about more about what that means at the end of this video but you can click on those links and then explore a lot of the things if not all of the things that I'm about to show you so let's start by talking about the server so here we have one side of the rat this is a 12 you rack if you're new to rock technologies when you see these little holes here three of them together make up one you and the spacing between them varies a little bit when you jump from one you to the next so you can't just put your stuff in any hole you please it does have to align specifically to one you so this is a 12 you wreck it's on wheels so I can wheel it around wherever I want and then the server that we're looking at here is a Dell r7 10 now the Dell r7 10 is kind of old in fact it's it's really old at this point I bought this server I don't know probably about four years ago at the price of three hundred and fifty bucks now these servers come in a couple different formats you can see here the disk drive that we're looking at here there's four slots for disk drives on this particular server these hold three-and-a-half inch disks searching for a server you can buy a Dell r7 tune or Dell are 720 but you want to pay attention to what size disks it will hold because they'll either be a three and a half inch bay or a two and a half inch bay and the two and a half inch bay limits your functionality and capabilities quite a bit too well only two and a half inch discs the three and a half inch disk though have the option of getting three and a half inch drives or two and a half inch drives here's one of those three and a half inch caddies I was talking about that can hold a three and a half inch drive they're labeled on the side which holds you can screw your drives into there are adapters that can come in these three-and-a-half-inch caddies that can form down to a two and a half inch caddy so if you have two and a half inch SSDs you can still use a three and a half inch server and just use the adapter to put trim and a half inch SSDs for instance on my server right here I have two SSDs right here and then a three-and-a-half inch one terabyte drive right there now let's jump to the other side of the server and check out what's on the back of the server and the networking equipment so here's the thing about the Dell r7 ten it's really old and in fact they're really phased out at this point on ebay if you're searching for a new server the exact same price or maybe even a little bit less than I spent on that Dell are 710 now you can get the Dell r7 20s our 720's are getting pulled out of production racks as they're refreshed with Dell r7 30s or Dell r7 40s so let's jump over to ebay and take a look at one of the Dell r7 20s that I recommend so from eBay I'm gonna search for Dell our 720 here and I'll search for a couple things I'm gonna search for 3.5 so it gets those three and a half inch bays and 64gb so it gets 64 gigs of ram and right here one of the first one that pops up I really like this until our 720 three and a half inch server to six core processors so it's gonna have 12 physical cores 24 threaded then 64 gigs and eight trays available to us that you could actually use for storage so you could use these trays to put things in like raid 0 raid 1 raid 5 and so on but the kicker here is just know that this doesn't come with any storage you'll need to buy your own three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives and you may even want to check the description to see which version of idrac it comes with or how many caddies it actually comes with a quick way to get to those caddies that I'm talking about and the adaptors is just go to my Amazon storefront here you can check the description one more time go to home lab equipment and then right here kind of towards the bottom left there says three and a half inch caddy with two and a half inch adapter I'll give that a click and you can see we're looking at 1699 for the caddy and the adapter itself that comes with it you can take that adapter how so you're not stuck with it you can use this caddy for a three and a half inch drive or a two and a half inch now I did mention that the server itself is running ESXi and because it's a Dell are 710 it can't run the latest version of ESXi it has to run actually ESXi version 6.0 since then there's been six point five six point seven and 7.0 but when you try and install those on these really old servers like are seven tens it literally tells you your server isn't compatible with the processors that you've selected so you can't install ESXi 6.5 on are seven ten it punts it out but you shouldn't have any issues if you bump up to an are seven twenty or even in are seven thirty now you can see the specs right here there's the 64 gigs of ram I've got 12 cores here and the speed is at two point nine three gigahertz my storage section here you can see I've got two SSDs that I've selected here and then the spinning disk that's available to me to having that one terabyte SSD is great because it's pretty quick and snappy the networking section itself i've got two v switches that are set up here so that I can use to different physical NICs just to isolate traffic for my virtual machines and when we take a look at my Eve ng virtual machine that I have you can see I gave it 24 CPUs and forty eight gigs of ram and if I take a look at the monitor well it's not really doing much at all right now when I start running an actual lab I typically see the CPU jump up to 15 or 20 percent depending on how many nodes I have on the topology and the RAM it doesn't take up that much be there it takes up maybe 15 or 20 gigs of RAM when I have a very large to power another super important thing that I need to point out about these servers is it's running the ESXi right now currently version 6.0 because ESXi is free and check this out yes x i once it's booted of runs and ram so the storage that it lives on isn't very important so if i actually open a little hood here so now we're looking at the back of the server here I've got the two power supply units and then the four Ethernet ports for the server itself you can also see the flashing lights above and then over here to the left a little bit there is some fiber connectivity on this device now one of the things that is missing on the server that I think is very very important when you're shopping for a server is something called I direct Iraq is how you can remotely access the console of this server you can think about it like the console port on a switch just brings you in straight into the device idrac is the console of a server that you can access over networks so something's going wrong with your server or you want to install a new operating system on it you can do all of that over Hydra HP has a similar feature called Eylau now let's move up to the network now we're taking a look at a couple switches here first up I have the old faithful Cisco Catalyst 3750 G these things are ancient but man they work great that G stands for gigabit so all of these ports here are Gigabit Ethernet they can support p OE but you do have to search for it and buy it when you buy it you can pick up these switches for pretty affordable under a hundred bucks these days and then we move up just a hair more and we have a catalyst 3650 which is a newer switch it's good it's not even end-of-life and it runs iOS x ii love the 3654 learning things like software-defined networking or network automation and programmability because these devices if you have the right version of iOS XE they can support net comp and rest comp sitting over here in a different title in the room I've got two e^x 4200 series 48 port p OE juniper switches these were four juniper studies and when I was recording the J and CI a dev ops course for CBT Nuggets I love these switches can't beat them huge bang for your buck I'm eventually gonna give these away and part of a giveaway on Dana Knox's YouTube channel time you talk about books I've got a lot of books here that are being used for my CCIE studies they're part of the Amazon wish list that you can check out in the description doesn't even begin to scratch the surface on the number of books that I have and this is just tied specifically to my current Cisco studies but I love things like automate the boring stuff with Python or when you're learning Python I also love mastering Python networking that was a great book to read to I even loved learn PowerShell in the month of lunches as well as c-sharp 8.0 and dotnet core for learning that programming language too now my home network itself is all unified I've used unify stuff for years and if you follow network chuck or Jeremy Chari you know about unify stuff too because they've been on that bandwagon for a little while now I've got the unified dream machine because I love that 800 megabits per second with IPS turned on I also use unify switches and unify APs throughout my house to unify dream machine a port unify switch a little MacBook in case I ever have to do some client testing it's also a ps4 prone and Nintendo switch now downstairs we saw the unified dream machine as well as in a poor POS which that connects upstairs to this unify a port POS which along with little Raspberry Pi there's of course the actual PC itself that does all of the magic there is a 32 inch curve samseong and then if we look up there's my unify AP so here is the unified 8 port switch if I pan down just for a moment you'll also see a poor base and nology drive this has done so much for me it has acted as a file share and just network storage as well as served as an I scuzzy target when I was going through VMware and hyper-v studies I needed to make failover clusters so that way there was shared storage between my servers and I could then do things like V motions or hyper-v Live migrations now last and most importantly might actually be the boson exam sim environment where I have my practice exams ready to rock and roll I've been using boson for a really really long time for years in fact if I go to my downloads you can see I've been using it from the beginning with all of my Microsoft MCSE network plus the old school CC and peter out yeah I've been using boson for years and my exam studying method has always been the same CBT Nuggets then books then lab then boson now I'm gonna go into a lot more as a get closer to taking the encore exam in fact I'm going to take one of these practice exams we're going to do a live stream call it a study session and we can go through this practice exam together but just know that this is a crucial critical part to my studying process is loading up a boson practice exam and just seeing how I'm ready to rock and roll with this I particularly love boson when you're in the study mode because you can click this show answer and it doesn't just show you the correct answer it tells you why the right answer was right and why the wrong answers were wrong you'll be super prepared after taking boson practice exams now about those affiliate links in the description basically if you click those and purchase any of these products I'll get a small kickback from that purchase this ultimately goes into reinvesting in my channel so that I can do more stuff to make better content maybe that's lab equipment maybe that's recording equipment whatever the case is that's the point but if you don't click these and buy them anyways I totally support that because I'm here to recommend these products for your success not for me to make money I'm putting up all of these in this video right now because I believe in these products I'm currently using them in my own environment to help me get prepared for whatever I'm working on next so that's been my lab environment thanks for stopping by y'all i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Data Knox

Views: 25,139

Rating: 4.9238753 out of 5

Keywords: homelab computer, build a home lab, ccna home lab, home lab, how to build a homelab, my home ccna ccnp lab, home network, homelab setup, it home lab, building a homelab, computer homelab, best homelab setup, ccna home lab 2020, home network setup 2020, ccna home lab guide, hyperv homelab, esxi homelab, home server rack, home server build, home lab rack, home server setup, home server rack build, home server tour, home server lab

Id: YjPP6Jyvj_M

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020