What is a HomeLab and How Do I Get Started?

one of the questions that comes up time and time again is how do i get started with home labbing this is a great question and i get asked this all the time in my live streams but i figured i'd answer it here first i think we need to clarify what a home lab is so what is a home lab i think in its simplest terms it's a sandbox where you can build play and learn about technologies without the fear of breaking things it's a place where you can experiment safely outside of your normal environment or your work environment you can use it for personal projects self-learning growth or even just as a hobby many people use it for self-hosting services networking in firewall storage game servers web servers media servers virtualization containerization certifications security tools and many many other use cases and as far as hardware goes it can be as simple as an old computer a low powered raspberry pi or even a complete clustered multi-server rack with networking so it can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be but before you do anything did you know your first home lab could be free free home lab yes free but listen since we've already established some of the things you can do with a home lab you'll need to take a second and think about what the goals are for your home lab what do you want to do what do you want to accomplish what do you want to learn is it going to run 24 7 or just on demand how many users will you have and so having an idea of what you're trying to accomplish will help determine the size requirements for your home lab but let's start with free everyone loves free right well the easiest way to get started for free could be on the machine that you're on right now and it's with virtualization virtualization allows you to create many virtual machines as if they were physical machines on your network you can create linux guests or windows guests that run on that machine as if they were on your network or not depending on how you configure networking and you can also create as many machines as you have resources for the nice thing about this option besides it being free is that you can shut these down and spin them up on demand so if you only need to run a linux server to do some testing you can start it up and then shut it down and the same goes for a windows machine and this is also a great way to start evaluating your needs to help you determine whether or not you need to buy something and if you decide that you've outgrown virtualization or you need something on 24 7 this next option is also free and that's an old computer yes an old computer and so just to be clear a server's not defined by its hardware but defined by its role and by definition it's really just any computer that serves information to other computers but anyways when using an old computer you'd be surprised on how much compute you're going to get from it most old computers are more than capable of running workloads and you'd be surprised at what people are giving away for free the average computer lifespan is about five years and a five-year-old computer can run quite a bit this one that i'm using right now is almost five years old and my first home lab computer was one that was destined for the trash until i asked my manager if i could have it that computer was really old even back then it was really old but it was just enough to install linux on and learn about linux and then shortly after install windows on and learn about file sharing and active directory and then later on become my router to learn about networking and so sometimes old computers are just enough and if it weren't for that one i may not have a home lab today so try not to rule out old computers and while we're on the old computer topic we may as well touch on the next one and that's upgrading your current pc and then using your old pc as a homeland pc the reason why i tell most people to do this is because you get two benefits one you get to upgrade the machine you use the most this one and two you get a dedicated computer for a home lamp this is a pretty good value if you're on the fence about building out a home lab because you get all of the tech and performance games on the machine you use the most while setting aside your old one as a new home lab machine and then if you decide that this isn't for you you have the option to sell or donate that one to someone who needs it and the reason why i recommend this one the most is because it's a great value and speaking of great value the next one i often recommend is a raspberry pi raspberry pies keep getting better and better and for a relatively low price you get a lot of computing power and there's so many projects you can run on a raspberry pi whether it be on raspbian or any other linux distribution it's unreal and not only are they low in price but they use a tiny fraction of power that traditional servers use and with a lot less heat raspberry pies are a great way to get started with home labs and i highly recommend them and if one day you decide you need some more compute or you don't want a home lab anymore you can repurpose that raspberry pi to a million projects i have a few in my environment right now one used to run pie hole but now i've repurposed it to the led panel back there and another a pi zero is still in my environment doing a pretty critical task and if you're interested i'll have some links in the description below of pies that work great and so now we're jumping from one of the smallest lowest price devices to one of the most powerful biggest devices and that's a dedicated rackmount server and there are quite a few options here so let me break this down first of all your server can be consumer grade hardware and convert it to a server by putting it inside of a rack mount case this will allow you to rack mount that server just like any other server or networking equipment in your rack and this is a great option if you have an old pc that you want it to fit nicely in your rack with your other equipment and this is something i still do today one of my servers is actually two pcs ago it's almost eight years old and i breathe new life into it by converting it to a server and putting it inside of a rack mount case and these type of pc conversion servers work great for general purpose workloads so for things like game servers web servers kubernetes docker virtualization all of these things should work great in something like that however i will recommend against using something like this if you're going to use it as a nas or use something like zfs because you'll want ecc ram in that server memory with error corrected and so this kind of feeds into the next option which is enterprise class gear and once you get to a certain point you may start to look for that and so when we talk about enterprise gear we're talking about servers with multiple disks back planes with hot swappable hard drives dual necks quad nicks 10 gigabit nicks dual processors with 4 8 16 cores dual power supplies many high speed server fans and lots of ecc ram sometimes hundreds of gigs ipmi for remote management and many more features that enterprises use to ensure that their services continue to run in a server like this you could have lots of virtual machines running each with lots of ram lots of cpus and lots of disk space and if you end up going this route you're gonna get a lot of compute and you're gonna get a lot of these features we just talked about there are some good deals out there and although this might be more than you're looking for you can get a really really good value if you buy these used or refurbished because enterprises are deprecating these every day they're looking for bigger better faster machines and getting rid of their old ones at a reasonable price and so i too have used enterprise gear in my rack and if you're interested i'll have some links below to servers that are a pretty good deal and so my home lab is actually made up of all of these things i have old computers in my own lab that i've converted to servers i have raspberry pi's in my home lab one that i've taken out and converted to another project then i have used enterprise gear and some custom bare bone servers and this is part of the joy of having a home lab it'll grow and change as your needs grow and change you'll start to mix and match parts and pieces and brands and servers and gear and rack and networking you name it to build out your environment and that's something else unique about most people's home labs no two are the same most home labs are tailored to individuals needs and they're almost as unique as the individual who built it and so that's why i really enjoy home lab i get to customize a whole entire environment or i'm the network administrator i'm the system administrator i'm the devops engineer i'm the software engineer i'm the cloud engineer in my own personal environment and without the fear of destroying someone else's environment and although i've only scratched the surface on what a home lab is what it can be used for and how to build one the possibilities are really endless and i'm curious to know what you end up building or how you end up using your servers and i'm curious what your environment looks like so let me know in the comments below and if you found anything helpful don't forget to like and subscribe thanks for watching appreciate it welcome welcome to the channel uh just chatting right now about uh about a lot of tech stuff i think we're all over the board between kubernetes k3s docker servers um possibly blue iris windows server 2019 i'm all over the place but i don't mind it because i have a short attention span sometimes so it's it's nice to just bounce around from topic to topic uh but yeah hit me with your questions you have a question about anything i'll try to answer it and if not i'll find someone who knows the answer at least i'll try in the limited amount of time on stream that i have to find someone who knows the answer

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 63,746

Keywords: techno tim, homelab, home lab, what is a homelab, how do I get started homelabbing, homelabber, beginner, home lab setup, home lab guide, virtualization, home server, tutorial, how to, home lab ideas, inspirational, server, rpi, raspberry pi, virtual box, home servers, home lab tour, we are home lab, things to do with a home lab, what is a home lab, learning, self hosted, network, firewall, storage, containerization, certification, security, hardware, virtual, server rack, free home lab, goals

Id: gPGf4Y8nQqM

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/snortingfrogs]

Tim is a very underrated techtuber imho.

He got some really good videos.

[u/Techno-Tim]

Wow, thank you for sharing! I hope got it right! It's such a huge topic!

[u/checkoutchannelnine]

By far one of my favorite channels. I frequently go back to watch older videos as I have questions come up around things that Tim has covered.

Quality content and always informative.

[u/jangofett27]

Awesome vid

[u/afro_coder]

I love how this content is created, no extra sound effects and his voice is normal and calming.

[u/ent3r_]

Nice! Saw it pop up in my recommendations, was planning on watching it later. I recon it'll be the perfect video considering I just got my first raspi 4 4gb.

And also, Tim is awesome! Binge watched basically every video on homelabs he had a while back, loving his content!

Loving it, u/Techno-Tim!