How to start your HomeLab journey?

hey everybody this is Christian and in this video I'm going to tell you how to start your H lab Journey it's the coolest hobby you can have as a tech Enthusiast and if you're working in it trust me getting that hands-on experience will Skyrocket your it career but I know if you're just about to start this journey and you might see all these incredible H lab builds from other people I mean just follow some of the big Tech creators here on YouTube you know what I'm talking about then you can get quite overwhelmed and maybe even confused where to begin so that's why I wanted to make this video to shed some light on all this weird Tech we are using in a home lab and share my best practices and how to start your hom lab journey I hope you this is going to be valuable to you building your home lab is such a great way to get hands-on experience in it but it is also important to learn the fundamentals and get recognized in the industry and let me point you to a fantastic resource to master all these cool and exciting topics we are learning in a home lab the simply learns devops engineer Ma Master course which covers deployment methodologies cicd pipelines tools like git Docker and Jenkins and many more valuable skills with this course you can become a def Ops engineer which is one of the most demanding roles in it right now with an average salary of $95,000 per year the course is well established and has over 40,000 reviews you can see by reading those that all of the students are very happy with the learning experience and what I personally like a lot about this course is that it features the Google Cloud Hands-On labs and it is focused on real life projects so you're not just learning the theoretical skills you're actually getting the knowledge that is requested by the companies and it's perfect for practicing projects on the cloud-based labs and also in your home labs in this course you will learn all the devops tools and methodologies that are important such as Docker and container orchestration with kubernetes as well as many other projects you can do including AWS and sensible Linux GitHub and so many more and not to forget you get an industry recognized devops engineer Master certificate from Simply learn at the end of the course simply learn also has courses available from all of the world's leading universities in subjects such as data science and business analytics Ai and machine learning project management and so many more so if you're ready to become a devops engineer then check out the simply learns Master course you will find a link in the description box down below and a big thanks go out to Simply learn for sponsoring this video okay so let's get back to topic and before I start giving you some specific tips for building a home lab let's first clarify what exactly is a home lab a home lab is basically a playground to learn more about information technology and experiment with all sorts of it equipment a lot of people use it for educational purposes such as learning how to build professional computer networks or experiment with different operating systems like Linux and windows While others might want to drill into self hosting and build their own applications at home a home lab can literally be anything you want and it varies from just a small Raspberry Pi to a gigantic data center that allows you to run any kind of workloads in a high available setup really the sky is the limit and maybe the money on your bank account and now I hope I got you excited and you want to build a home lab yourself the only question that might come up now is how exactly do you do that and where should you start let's make it simple there are in my opinion three essential areas or topics you will always find in a home lab it's Hardware software and networking if you're staring a home lab you should have a good plan about all those three areas and what it is that you'd like to achieve and let's start talking a bit about Hardware so how do you decide what devices you should use and buy to build your home lab don't worry if that's an area where you don't have much experience yet I'm also not the smartest guy when it comes to Hardware honestly for beginners or people with a lower budget the most simple and easiest way would be to just use the hardware or equipment that you have right now really you can use any program like virtual box or Microsoft hyperv which are all free for you to download and then install a virtual machine to make this your first H lab server this allows you to start your experiments without damaging the system you're working on but of course if you are a bit more serious about building a dedicated home lab because you like to run it 24/7 or self host applications or providing a file storage well then it's useful to pick another separate machine for that for example if you have an old desktop or gaming PC lying around you can just use this as your new home server to Breathe new life into it and this is not just a great opportunity for beginners for example I personally also like to run all of my home servers on desktop PC Hardware of course you have to keep some things in mind like how much memory do you need or how many SATA ports and PCI Express slots the mainboard should have for example especially if you're planning to build a storage server and connect multiple hard drives together it can get a bit tricky by times but also in the past I've used any other desktop mainboards with AMD or Intel CPUs as home servers and I never had any issues even though I'm running many virtual machines and workloads on those devices now if you're interested in smaller and even more power efficient setups I can also recommend the Raspberry Pi which is a small affordable single board computer that can be used for various types of projects I've also tested here on this channel the zma board so this is a similar computer like the Raspberry Pi but it is a real x86 architecture CPU and it is also very power efficient I'm running this little thing in my home lab to keep some services like my iot controllers or my DNS servers always online even when my bigger machines go to sleep but also running thin clients or buying some smaller mini computers is a great alternative to start your home lab with a lower budget however you should keep in mind that those machines usually don't have too much power they are probably fine to run a few smaller applications but if you need more power and the desktop PC Hardware is a bit too boring for you maybe you like to get a little crazy in your home lab there's also a lot of bigger more professional server equipment around like the Dell power Edge serious for example which you can get in all different sizes and configurations for your home lab you really you get get as much power as you need also the HP Pro Series is very well known and I'm telling you a little secret here because if you don't need the latest and greatest versions of those servers you can get some pretty cheap deals on eBay here and there a lot of companies usually retire their data center equipment every few years and since they don't really know what to do with them they're just selling them as old and refurbished on eBay although they are fully functional most of the time so the investment cost for professional server equipment doesn't necessarily have to be that expensive and there are a few benefits you typically only get with these like the ability to manage them over the network which is really nice even when the devices are powered off or redundant components such as dual power supplies dual CPUs ECC memory support and those kind of things now I personally and I know many people will disagree with me here but I'm not super excited about using those professional servers for my hob lab most professional servers especially the rec versions can get so noisy and so po hungry in Germany electricity prices have just exploded recently it's not very efficient for me to run professional server equipment but yeah if you have a separate room maybe in the basement and you don't care about your electricity bill it can be really nice to get your hands on this professional server equipment and build your own data center at home even if it's just to flex that's totally fine but yeah that should give you a great overview of all the different options you have to build a home lab it can get from small and power efficient devices such as raspberry Pies mini computers or thin clients to medium and advanced builds with desktop PC Hardware all up to the crazy professional server equipment you can use in the end it's totally up to you what you want to do and how much money you want to invest in your home lab now let's come to the second area you should think about when building a home lab which is the software you want to run of course one big question that comes up here is what type of operating system you want to install on your new hob server should it be windows or Linux and if so which distribution should you pick but also which applications and services you're planning to deploy and whether you're going to install them directly on the server or if you want to run them in a container there are many many vital options you have here and it can be quite overwhelming to find out where to start so let me tell you what I personally would do if you know me guys I'm a huge huge fan of proxmox an open source hypervisor platform based on Linux KVM I'm using this on all of my main home servers to run all sorts of workloads like virtual machines containers storage everything and I really believe it is such a great system for both beginners but also Advanced users but also many other systems that have a hypervisor on board like tress unrate Windows server or X PNG are a great fit for a home lab operating system you can just install those systems that directly on your server hardware and it allows you to test and play around with all sorts of different operating systems without damaging your main system if you want to try out a new Linux dist no problem just create a new viral machine and start playing around with it it also allows you to split certain types of applications into different systems like on my proxmox cluster I'm running an application server a database server some container orchestration servers a Windows domain controller and I also have many other demonstration servers where I can just play around with anything that I like by the way if you want to get some more details about all those different options like prox boox tress Linux or Windows then check out my video about the best Home Server operating system there I've talked about this topic in much more detail of course I will leave you a link in the description box down below but generally speaking except for any smaller systems like the Raspberry Pi or zma boards where it probably doesn't make much sense to run multiple systems I would say always pick an operating system that has an easy management platform for running virtual machines don't try to do it with Linux kbm on your own trust me you will thank me later now as for the virtual machine operating systems themselves I'm personally a huge fan of Ubuntu Linux but this is mostly just personal preference there are so many other Linux distributions around that you could use in your home lab such as Debian or Centos again I'm not telling you which one is the best I'm only telling you the ones that I like the most so no need to to start a religious discussion about Linux here but that's it about the main operating system if you are wondering how can you get started with deploying applications in hom lab though like web servers homb dashboards file storage and so on you might also know I'm a big fan of running applications in containers maybe you already heard about Docker which is my absolute favorite tool to deploy and manage containers containers give you a similar to Virtual machines a better way of separating and isolating workloads from each other and it's much easier for software developers to build a container image to ship their apps with all the necessary requirements and libraries in a prepackaged format but despite these advantages of the architecture and benefits for software developers I think we as Homeland people appreciate containers because of something else and that is the ability to run our apps so simple and easy with container management platforms and tools some of you might already know POA which is a platform that allows you to manage and deploy application templates for all sorts of container images like web servers databases and so many more I also recently made a video about doch which is another open source project similar to POA but maybe a bit more beginner friendly I personally also love to use darker compost which allows you to manage containers with a standardized yaml template files for me this is just a perfect way to deal with containers and it's also a great tool for my tutorial videos because everyone just knows how to use it trust me using containers in your home lab will tremendously speed up your workflow and if you're really crazy just like me and you want to take it to the next level you might also dive into container orchestration now this of course is an advanced topic but running container orchestrators like Docker swarm kubernetes or open shift allows you to deploy applications and other container resources in a high available cluster you could even use some raspberry pies or smaller systems to bundle them together and distribute your workloads across multiple machines it is a super cool project but I have to warn you kubernetes is a lot more complicated than Docker is I mean I've spent hours and hours trying to learn kubernetes and actually I still have the feeling I understand like half of it but as a conclusion so if you're are a beginner starting your home lab Journey right now then take a look at Docker learn some of the fundamentals and use all the great tools for managing containers like potena doch and dark compost and at some point if you feel confident about containers then check out container orchestration with kubernetes so that's what I do in my home laap and I believe it's a great learning path for everyone else all right so last but not least let's also talk about hom lab networking I know networking is a huge topic on its own but I believe this video is already pretty long so I'm going to focus on the most important things you will need to start building ACD cure and also robust home lab Network just like with every area of your home lab your networking setup can be as small or as large as you want for example in my network everything is controlled by my firewall the SOS xgs 2100 which is a huge W firewall that has multiple interfaces and a fast network connection to my switch the sofos Cs 110 this setup allows me to configure vlans so I've split my network into multiple areas where my private Network my server Network and my management Network are I isolated from each other entirely and only the firewall is in control of the traffic between those networks so when I want to copy a fire from my servers or connect via SSH to them this traffic automatically is scanned and filtered by my firewall to protect my servers against any attacks no I know this equipment is pretty expensive and I only got it because I worked for this company and these are my testing devices that I got for free but if you're interested in building a more professional home network like me and you don't don't want to get broke there are a few cheaper options you have for example you could build and set up a small mini computer with two network interfaces like the zema board and install a firewall software on that device I've already tested to install the sofos XG software on the zma board this just works perfectly also if you need more performance on your firewall you could also run a firewall as a virtual machine on one of your home servers and of course you don't need to use this software's XG software although it's a pretty great next gen firewall system which is totally free in the home version by the way but you could also think about using any other system like pfSense or open sense are great Alternatives which are open source firewall softwares and they allow you just like on the XG to set up scanning rules and policies to protect your home lab Network you can also use these firewalls to manage DNS DHCP vlans and other things and that gives you much more power and control for your H lab Network I can just recommend to set up a fireball trust me you won't regret this if you're combining this with a powerful managed switch that allows you to segment your network which makes the home lab even more robust and secure as I said I'm running the soft house CX 110 switch a 24 Port Poe managed switch that has four fast 10 GB SSP plus interfaces and 241 GB ethernet ports if you want to buy a smaller cheaper switch you can also look out for some great eight Port managed switches at least just take care if they have VLAN capabilities but this will allow you to play around with many Advanced networking setups you will also face in any professional it environment those are all of the important topics and areas that I can imagine and I hope this gave you many many project ideas and some inspiration and guidance on how to start your HB Journey but don't worry if you feel a bit overwhelmed by all of these different terminologies and projects it doesn't mean that you have to have those things in place tomorrow just take your time do good research and enjoy the process doing those projects one by one I know home labbing is a huge complicated topic and you will never run out of projects or problems just like me I'm fully booked out with topics for the rest of the year but yeah that's it for me I hope you enjoyed this video please check out our community on Discord and patreon a huge Thanks goes out to all of the members of our program you guys are really the best and thanks everyone for watching I will catch you next week take care bye-bye

Channel: Christian Lempa

Views: 61,519

Keywords:

Id: 3-Nm15utD3g

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024