How to Create an Enterprise Home Lab

so in this video I'm going over setting up an enterprise environment in a home lab or your home or small business because a lot of these things I wanted to teach just kind of the fundamentals so you can go out and do some crazy things and even if you're just doing a Plex Media Server or hosting your pictures and videos on your home lab or you know you want to expand your IT skills and look at maybe a Senior Systems Engineer job or something of that nature well all this is really gonna help you because you're gonna know what enterprise environments would use so obviously we can't use exactly what they're using but I'm gonna go ahead and lay out the three fundamentals and those really are storage virtualization and servers and we're gonna touch on those three pillars I'm gonna kind of show you what I use in my home lab and also tell you what you'd see in maybe an enterprise space so first off let's go ahead jump right into storage now in storage in a previous video where I talked about Windows servers in enterprise or business well I said ZFS might go to an ZFS I usually would be using an Oracle appliance and that would have support and other things tied into it that appliance itself typically starts on the low end between probably twenty and fifty thousand dollars and goes well up into the six figures depending on the needs of the business not really conducive of a home lab so how do you learn that tech how do you understand how ZFS works all these things well there's a project called freenas FreeNAS is fantastic a lot of people might be groaning when I say that just because freeness in its early days at kind of a crappy GUI and some other things but I think really X I I X Systems has done a fantastic job revamping its GUI and really making it kind of sexy in recent years I really done a lot of videos since freenas 11 came out it was one of actually first playlists i had on the channel and i Exum's actually featured it in their linkedin and also on the twitter so big shout out to them they were actually one of the first things that got this channel going before I kind of found my niche in Linux and with that what FreeNAS is is it's based on FreeBSD not Linux and also it runs ZFS which is that file system that I absolutely love because of how reliable performance is better just everything across the board and ZFS just shoots everything out of the water from any other file system now having said that a lot of people are gonna go wait a second better FS or ext for these types of file systems are very good and that's what Linux uses and far better than what Windows uses which is NTFS and fat32 which is garbage proprietary garbage at that it's not even better than anything on the market it's actually one of the worst file systems out of all of them so just to kind of give you a range of file systems there but to get back to my original point free nas will teach you kind of how ZFS works it'll teach you a lot of the fundamentals now if you're interested in FreeNAS I again I've already done a bunch of videos I have about ten videos over FreeNAS going over setup installation what happens if a hard drive fails how to actually change things out a whole variety of things and actually kind of check up on the actual discs in FreeBSD all these things are pretty much mandatory when it comes to a storage environment and this is a great spot to kind of cut your teeth and jump into this storage because honestly the storage is the foundation and where everything is stored now freenas by itself you can do some cool things with it it does jails which you know you could actually spin up like plex server and other things and I've done a video on that as well I don't particularly like this feature you can use it if you're not interested in the virtualization piece that I'm about to jump into however I use it exclusively for storage just because I it's storage I think that jails are it yeah you know I don't really enjoy them I'd rather run a separate server virtualized on bare metal Hardware somewhere else but the storage and ZFS is so so powerful because you can set up NFS shares you can set up SMB shares if you have a mixed environment between Windows and Linux you can set up even Apple shares if you want but everything everything's fair game and I've also used I scuzzy shares for connecting basically direct-attached storage which is if I set up a server but I don't want to use its internal storage to store anything I can actually use that I scuzzy target and connect that up and say hey this is its hard drive sitting over on the FreeNAS server but all the hardware from this actual computer or host is going to be used so very very powerful stuff I love it learn free knives learn all the ins and outs of it learn the different types of storage shares NFS I scuzzy SMB Apple share if that's a thing I'm not an Apple guy I don't like using Apple pretty much anything so I never really used that portion of it but everything is there in FreeNAS that's why it's the first piece of the puzzle and again check out that playlist I'll link it up here and in the description and then second on the piece of the puzzle of an enterprise environment is virtualization so pretty much every enterprise environment runs VMware some use hyper-v but that's kind of falling behind now as far as performance and other things so I don't really recommend hyper-v anymore almost everything's VMware they've done a great job of keeping up and then there's what's called Citrix XenServer now Citrix XenServer by itself kind of has a niche virtualization market and it's been out for about a decade now for quite a while and it's a niche market is GPU pass-through because it does it pretty well and they actually put this behind a paywall so you can't really get to it using XenServer even though the it's open source which it's kinda there but a lot of the features again are locked behind a paywall so why am i bringing all this up there's a project called xcp in G which is fantastic it's basically XenServer but they forked the open source portion of it and then looked at all the paid features and just added them in and open sourced everything the company that did this is in Orchestra which has done the web GUI for XenServer for many many years and also they give that away for free and if you want all the features of this really powerful software it should basically put your entire hypervisor dashboard in your web browser you can just build it from source and you'll have every single paid feature and everything right there so why would they give out all this for free many people would ask and that is if you're gonna do this in a business environment they have support plans and those support plans are pretty pricey as you can imagine if you're doing this in a data center you definitely have some money to throw it around and those support plans are basically pennies to a big business that would save so much money doing X C P and G instead of like a VMware setup it'd probably be adventure' 1/10 to 100 the price of VMware licenses so a big difference and if I was actually administering it I'd want some kind of support so it'd be a no-brainer but for you the home user what this means is you can use XE P and G get full functionality across the board have everything in your home lab to virtualize and do pretty much whatever you want and again I've done a bunch of videos I'll link up a playlist that goes over virtualization and basically what virtualization if you're watching this video and you don't know what that is it's using one computer one base hardware and then putting like four or five pcs inside of it or virtualization instances I call them VMs virtual machines and they all run on the bare metal as if it's its own machine which is pretty awesome they all have their independent NIC cards and it's it's just way better than anything you've done it's not the same as running like KVM or a virtual or a VM workstation or those types of things that sits on top of an operating system this actually works right off the bare metal so that's why bare-metal hypervisor czar super important and XE P&G for a home lab I think is just an awesome addition because otherwise you're messing with VMware and it's usually trial based license keys and it's just a pain in the butt to set up and if I had all the keys for sure VMware it's awesome but a lot of times I just don't like messing with it so x XE P&G to me is a natural thing and I'll put the playlist down in the description so you can learn more about XE P&G and setting up those bare-metal hypervisors and getting your feet wet in virtualization because you have to know virtualization especially if you're looking at you know senior system engineer and those types of things but for me personally I use my XE P&G Center hosts for those host systems I use like Plex next cloud and a bunch of other types of systems so you load up whatever you want on there if you want to run your web browser or website through it you can totally do that as well usually in a four core to eight core system you could load up anywhere between four and eight VMs are relatively comfortably as long as you had the memory to support those VMs but that's just my opinion on all that I really love running a lot of Linux based servers which is kind of like the next topic and Linux servers are so powerful and if you don't install a GUI which many Linux desktop users always have like desktop environments of all this overhead to Linux and I actually had to learn all that in this past year because that's kind of the main focus in this channel is Linux desktop Hut Linux servers oh my gosh why it's so big in business why it's the majority of servers is because it is so lightweight and also extremely powerful I can make a server do just one thing and then only allocate maybe one gig of memory in one virtual CPU which I can honestly share with another system if there's not much going on in that VM it's it's really really powerful so when it comes to servers I really cut my teeth on Linux servers and I love Linux for its servers capability and that's why almost every data center is just full of Linux servers because you can just assign it one role and just say hey I only want this VM to do this and then guess what with the virtualization setup you can do what's called a CH a or high availability and once you setup a CH a and there you can just say hey if this host dies let's say you have a that power supply goes out on that host with a CH a set up you already have another image of it and it just transitions that entire server running into this other host so you're at the house I have two or three kind of throwaway machines that constantly die and do glitchy things I should probably throw them away but I really like setting up a CH a and simulating a really unstable environment to kind of check out having some really crazy things happen because it's really neat to see AJ kind of move the VMS around as the systems fail and I kind of make a little game about it you know trying to keep a hundred percent uptime on really really crappy hardware which when you go into business and you have all this redundancy it's very rare you ever have one host die much less two or three and emulating that in a home environment super powerful especially when going into the employment field because I think a lot of people don't realize is once you get in and you get a job usually people look at certifications in some experience and they're like ok this person's looked or seen these types of environments before therefore they must be qualified and you get a lot of paper tigers and people that just don't have much experience or they've been sitting there with lots of experience but nothing's really ever happened in that environment so they don't know what happens when you know crap hits the fame so to speak so that's why I really think it's important to make this enterprise environment in a home lab and that's how I personally do it so just to recap for storage set up a free Nass box totally awesome if you know how to do that entire playlist down in the description and then also next up is the virtualization xcp in G I'll put the link down below and then also leave you a playlist of virtualization so you can kind of learn all about it and then lastly the server's aspect now Linux server that is literally hundreds of videos and really it's learning that I need to do more content on setting up a Linux server I've done like lamp stacks and other things throughout my Linux videos check out my Linux playlist there that's almost a hundred videos now and a lot of it deals with desktop environments and servers I'm gonna try and break some of that out into a Linux servers playlist and do better on this aspect of it but just know that you need to learn Linux server and do lamp stacks and those types of things and if you need a recommendation from me I highly recommend Ubuntu 18.4 has a lot of quick setups for lamps tax next cloud servers Plex media servers if you're doing that very easy to follow along with a lot of steps online however if you're trying to learn it for business I highly recommend downloading and using CentOS because almost all the data centers of the world use rel or Red Hat Enterprise Linux and you know you kind of need to learn those as well but that's it setting up enterprise environment in a home lab these are kind of the basis of it I know I didn't actually show much of it I just kind of want to give you an idea of what it looked like taking the high availability all that redundancy in an enterprise environment putting in a home lab and roughly a very low cost I used a lot of recycled hardware or old dead hardware or a crappy hardware for this setup and it's amazing how much redundancy and just plain awesomeness you get from doing this so I only recommend everybody try it and let me know what your questions and thoughts are down in the comment section below because there's so much to this I'm gonna try and break this out into maybe a series coming up let me know if that's interested to you and a big shout out my patrons without you these videos would not be possible and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 58,303

Keywords: chris titus tech, home lab, how to make a home lab, lab, how to setup a vmware lab at home, home lab setup, home, homelab, home server, how to make a server rack, how to make a server, netapp home lab, enterprise server in house, vmware lab setup for home, virtualization home lab, the home lab, test computer lab at home, it home lab, cisco home lab cost, home network, vcp home lab, ccna home lab, create a free homelab, home server rack

Id: 4ey8YPGEUfs

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019