What is a HomeLab? How can you build your own and why it's useful!

you know what's going on YouTube this is Zach with IT career questions today I'm gonna talk to you guys about home labs now you may have heard me refer to these before and maybe why they're so important but if you are unfamiliar you might be thinking what is a home lab or if you are familiar with home labs you're like well I can't afford that it's too much money or you just can't get access to some of the equipment that may be required to produce your own home lab now I want to let you guys know this video may be a little bit long and I apologize for that but we're gonna try to cover everything that we possibly can at a basic level for home labs so you guys can understand why it's important what the purpose is and how you can gain an advantage through utilizing your own home lab to help you get a career in information technology so let's get started and talk about what a home lab is today's video is brought to you by IT Pro TV if you guys are looking to learn more about different certifications different technologies make sure you guys check out the link in the description below for IT Pro TV and there you can also utilize their own practice labs just like what kind of what we're talking about in this video today links in the description below use the coupon code I tcq 30 save 30% off of your subscription and you may be thinking is it some type of doctors lab is it like an evil science lab a home lab is simply a technology environment in your own home and what you do is you utilize different technologies different equipment to build somewhat of an enterprise environment within your home structure so you can utilize multiple switches routers servers different computers even utilize your own computer and you're building something within your home that could almost replicate what you could find in an enterprise environment now it's going to be of course more small scale in many ways but the possibilities that you can utilize a home lab for are endless so you could be utilizing a home lab to learn more about working where you're configuring switches maybe you're hooking up multiple computers to these switches and setting different rules within these switches what you're doing here is getting some hands-on experience and really trying to understand these technologies that you will run into in an enterprise environment now you can also utilize different computers servers even and build different virtual environments where you have a domain controller and you have Active Directory setup and you utilize multiple computers to log into the domain or set different groups and set different membership access and things like that really what I'm trying to say here is as I said before possibilities with this can be endless but at a basic level just kind of screwing around right just trying to understand some of what you may be learning at the current point in time and what the first thing that always comes to everybody's mind is I can't afford that and honestly that's just not the case because you can't afford it and I'm gonna talk about multiple ways that you would be able to afford this or obtain some of this equipment and as you guys can see behind me here and I'll put up an image of what's behind me here I have a server here I have a couple different laptops I have a couple different switches and then even a desktop computer now I got all of this equipment behind me for free three dollars it cost me absolutely nothing and what you can do to obtain free equipment yourself is reach out to different companies and ask them oh hey you guys recycling anything I'm looking to get in IT now the chances here are gonna be very very slim but it could be a possibility that they're going to you know phase out some of their old equipment and you could get your hands on that and bring it to your house to help utilize your own home lab now other ways to obtain some of this equipment especially desktops and things like that is doing your own home PC repairs or you know going out on a Facebook group or something and posting that you can fix people's computers laptops change out screens keyboards get rid of viruses etc etc the list goes on what happens when you start doing this and you start obtaining a customer base and the start coming back to you you know year after year is that eventually they'll start to upgrade their equipment and then they'll ask you hey I have this old equipment I want to get rid of it do you know what I could do and you could say yeah I would love to take that off your hands I know destroy the hard drive of course but I'll utilize this for my own home lab if that's ok with you and that's how you obtain some of the equipment that of course like I have I mean this desktop back here I obtained that for free I've obtained multiple laptops for free from customers because they were just getting rid of them and it's like well I could utilize that right now getting into the field when you first get into the field into your organization you'll find that they'll recycle things very often hopefully and you can get your hands on that as well sometimes you can buy some of this equipment back for really really cheap and speaking of buying that's the next step here right if you were to take a look at all the stuff behind me right now and put a retail value on it you're talking thousands of dollars and I by no means would want to pay thousands of dollars for this equipment it's old it may not be very good it works but it's not going to be worth me paying for right but for cheap I could pay for it if it's used maybe pick up a switch and it has a couple broken ports on it no big deal right I'm gonna pick it up for dirt cheap so again you reach out to companies and ask them these things you find out on Craigslist different Facebook groups there's other resale websites online read and get some of the stuff for pretty cheap and it's definitely well worth it and when I say cheap you could pick up a lot of this stuff for less than a hundred bucks each and that's a great deal especially when you're looking at like 37 50 switches which retail for you know thousands of dollars and you can pick up a used old one maybe it has a couple broken ports for you know 50 bucks that's a steal now you can't afford it right you just there's no way you could possibly afford even $50 I understand I have been there where we've all been there and that's okay you can virtualize everything anything that we've talked about so far that you could utilize you know hands on equipment for you can virtualize so there's great programs out there like VirtualBox or v where offers a free resource as well where you can virtualize different operating systems now I do this in my own home lab everything is almost pretty much done off of my main computer here and I'm gonna pull up VirtualBox just so you guys can get a quick idea of what I'm talking about so this right here is VirtualBox this is absolutely free to download and you can see here that I have a couple different operating systems on here we have Debian we have Kali Server 2016 Server 2019 and bun 2 these are all part of my own home lab and I utilize these different operating systems to complete different tasks cuz you can see the Kali machine says Python test machine for that Kali Box I utilize a couple different Python scripts to really test out and a lot of those have to do with different BOTS that I'm using for different social media things and that nature but it's just testing I don't really care what happens to that machine because I'm just using it to test things same with the December 2016 machine it's just testing things there's nothing really there except for the fact that it's joined to the same domain that our server 2019 boxes and that server 2019 box is our domain controller so we set up that server as our domain controller so that we could utilize things like Active Directory and Group Policy and things like that and we could join other computers to that domain and really try to play around with the different privileges different types of group associations and things like that so we can really have a good understanding of what we're getting into in enterprise environments now this right here absolutely 100% free to do you can download these is os for free from Microsoft website they're like 100 90-day evaluations but that's just fine you can redo it again and you should be documenting your process which we'll talk about later in this video however this is a great way to start building your own home lab now a couple things to note about virtualizing different operating systems from your computer there are not necessarily hard requirements other than you should have at least 4 gigs of ram now if you have more ram you can utilize different operating systems at the same time so on my machine I have 32 gigs of ram and I can spin up 3/4 of these machines without any issue now if you have four gigs of RAM a slower processor you may only be able to get away with one of these operating systems being virtualized at a time where you can actually launch it run it do things within it without your computer really getting slowed down a lot now what is important here is I didn't really mention processor speed entirely because the slower it is well the worst experience that you're gonna have the more RAM that you have the better experience you will have the better processor of course the better experience but as long as you have at least four gigs of RAM and a halfway decent processor you will be good to go so you can pick up literally any single computer from the last ten years or so and utilize it as a virtual machine so you can install virtualbox or VMs VMware's resource and utilize it you can do it it's not there's no hard requirements here and as I said the slower your computer is the worst your experience will be but you still can't experience it now I know you guys are gonna ask me well what is the best computer or you guys are going to start putting in the comments is this computer good for virtualization is that computer good for virtualization the fact of the matter is any single computer can be good for it you have to try it out and see how that process works but again four gigs of ram bare minimum that you will need and hopefully you have more because it's 2019 I think everything comes standard with like 8 gigs or 16 gigs so that is your virtualization within desktops in a nutshell right there's there's nothing that is a hard requirement for you guys you don't have to spend a lot of money to do this you can utilize your very own computer that you're maybe watching this from right now so for those of you out there who are looking into networking you say well I don't care about that virtualization stuff it doesn't really apply to me that much well it kind of does in some ways and we can talk about that in other videos but you can virtualize networks and there's a great software out there called gns3 you may have seen many other youtubers talk about this network chuck david bombil I think even duan lightfoot is talking about this as well you can download this program and virtualize your very own network so as you can see from the video here you're able to do a lot with gns3 as far as networking Goats so if you can't afford your own switch you can download this software for free follow tutorials all over the internet on how to get this prepared set up and really start diving deep into networking and understanding how switches and things like that work so at a very basic level building your own home lab can be relatively easy and inexpensive to do now why would you want to do this and the reason is very simple you're getting some type of experience some type of knowledge that you wouldn't normally gain now if you are a veteran to IT you more than likely have built a home lab in your past maybe you still currently have one and it's still a great resource to utilize if you guys are learning new material and trying to just figure out new technologies now if you are brand new to IT this is going to be one of the most beneficial things that you can do to really boost your career boost your knowledge and give you an advantage because you are understanding technologies at home and really diving deep into these different technologies at home that you normally wouldn't see because you haven't stepped foot into an enterprise environment yet so what you can do to utilize this at a grandiose scale is having documentation that shows that you've done set up servers set up different switches and utilize that on your resume because that is how you're gonna gain a huge advantage and you're probably wondering well why how and the reason is again very simple I said the reason is very simple a couple times in this video I apologize but you can put this on your resume you can put you know the different things that you have some skills in right now you will get noticed from this so if HR filters are scanning through things or somebody's reading through your resume and they see some of these different technologies that stick out then they kind of say well he doesn't have experience well they might call you in for the interview they might call you with more questions and you could say well hey I utilize my own home lab here's all of my documentation now the documentation part right a lot of people don't like documentation a lot of people get intimidated by documentation however documentation is one of the most essential skills that you should be learning when it comes to any career really but more specifically IT document every single thing that you do every step of the way every change that you make document it have a great base foundation to your documentation that gives a lot of the information that you can just look up quickly maybe you're you've utilized a domain controller so you've set that up and you can document that process that you went through to set up a domain controller you can document the process on configuring Active Directory maybe you've added multiple machines to the same domain you can document that process and it's going to be extremely beneficial for you now what I have on my screen here is just a quick documentation example that I created based off of some of my virtual machines and things like that and this isn't exactly what I have for my personal documentation because there's just a little bit more involved there and things that I don't necessarily want to share but this is just a great example of how you can document at a basic level here you can see I have my virtual machines I put my number of virtual machines in my environment the types of operating systems running from those virtual machines and then I have you know IP addresses the names of them the purpose of them I have the domain name here and we can go back to our server 2016 and you can see here that's the password which really isn't the password we just made that up later skater and we have the name IP domain the purpose of it the alternative purpose for it installed on workstation blah blah blah blah blah we have configured with a higher gigs of RAM HoneyBaked gigs a hard drive space four gigs of ram we have just a quick process that we went to for setting this up and it's barely very simple right now you can of course add on to this exponentially right you can do you can list every single thing that you did on this machine and it's gonna be greatly utilized it's going to be great resource for you now we have our bunk to machine again here's our password which really isn't our password and we have all that information there as well and all we kind of have the same for our network I don't personally have my network switches hooked up in any way right now but here is just a you know brief overview of how you can document part of that process we have our base configuration for our network on how our network gets connected from the initial connection all the way through our different devices and it's again simple to do we have our storage device listed in here and with more documentation you can put in here what you're utilizing and Nazz for and as you guys can see here not really utilizing mine Astra much other than I helped to put a virtual machine on there and then I have some different storage areas within that device to help really kind of segregate my data and again this is something that you can utilize to your advantage so how do you share this right well you could share this OneNote you could put a link to it in your resume create like a bitly link or something you can throw this out on a github page and obviously you want to redact some of the more crucial information like maybe IP addresses passwords usernames and things like that but you could put it on a github you can make a website now you making a website is really cheap nowadays that's really easy to do you can use things like Wix WordPress it builds it all for you but you could be taking pictures of your lab you can be posting documentation just like this you can be posting different blogs on things that you've done for the day for the week you can make videos put it stuff out on YouTube what's gonna be one of the most important things here is making sure that you can link back to all this information from your resume as you know you guys are always sending out digital resumes at this point hopefully you're making PDFs and you can include a link in there so you can put you know link to home lab link to documentation and put that link in there and when people are reviewing your resume they can go click on that and they can see some of the things that you've done some of this experience that you have and this is going to be huge for you this is how you gain that advantage by having access to your documentation access to the things that you have done so whether you have stepped foot into an IT or not this is going to be huge for you because employers are looking for people with experience and you can utilize this as your form of experience it shows a lot of dedication it shows that you're really interested in IT and it's going to be just a big benefit for you I want to give a huge shout out to everybody on LinkedIn who participated in my thread over there where I asked you guys to post pictures of your own home labs so that people can get an idea of what or how you can build your own lab at home and I will post a link to that in the description below so you guys can go check it out you can reach these people there ask them more questions about their whole setup how that process worked whatever you guys want links in the description below but here's a few examples of people's different home environments and here's a few examples of some people's personal home labs that they have in their own home and you guys can see they have different switches they have servers this person has a great workstation set up right there and they're utilizing these four different things of course you can reach out to them on LinkedIn for more information and here this person is utilizing a Raspberry Pi as part of their home lab raspberry PI's are a great resource to build your own home environment as well there's a lot of great information that you can find out on the internet about clustering raspberry PI's and building a great Network out of those so make sure you guys look into that if that's something you're interested in as well here's another great example of somebody's home lab looks really fancy right but they have obviously multiple monitors different machines set up here for their own home environment now here's one of my favorites just because it says C das CDOs run run run that's that's just funny is nerd joke right totally funny to me however you can see they have some switches here they have multiple monitors set up multiple computers set up here and this is part of their home lab which is what it looks great right I actually really do appreciate this one right here and here's another example of somebody's home network they're usually some tp-link routers to understand and learn networking maybe they have their own whole entire network set up within their environment but again it's just another great example and as you can see pretty basic right and it but it works great for them I hope this video helped answers the questions that you might have about building a home lab again you don't have to spend thousands hundreds of dollars even to build your own home lab you can virtualize everything but building a home lab is going to be a huge advantage to you so if you guys have any other questions or comments please go in our comments below let me know if you guys are utilizing your own home lab and what you have set up of course head over to LinkedIn where you guys can add pictures of your own home lab and talk about what you're doing over there as well or if you guys have some ideas go ahead and shoot them in the comments below and I'm sure somebody out there if not me will answer and help guide the path for you to building a great home lab that's all I got for you guys in today's video as always take it easy

Channel: I.T. Career Questions

Views: 138,834

Keywords: IT Career Questions, cyber security, it careers, technology, information technology, homelab, home lab, homelab setup, computer homelab, what is a homelab, how to build a homelab, building a homelab, homelab requirements, build your own computer lab at home, home computer lab, homelab setups, best homelab setup, information technology homelab, technology homelab, home computer labs, hyperv homelab, virtualbox, vmware, virtualization, networking, servers, how to build a server

Id: 4O_MxTPmah4

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019