Ahh I see you are a man of culture as well. So you want to start homelabbing? Then let me tell you, that you started a very cool and interesting journey. Also thank you for letting me be part of this journey, I hope you will find my information useful!
But where do I start?
This is the most tough question. If you just check /r/homelab, people go crazy with racks full of servers and routers worth thousands of dollars. But please, don be intimidated. Those folks collected for a long time and have spent a fortune on their equipment.
And what about us? We want to start easy and simple. The great thing about homelabs is, that there is no exact definition on what hardware you actually need to call it a homelab. You only got a raspberry pi? Great, this is a very good starting point and already gives you a great opportunity to learn new things. The only thing you should decide at this early point is what your main focus will be. Do you want to learn networking? Docker? Kubernetes? Or just get better at using bash on servers? You want to host your own applications? There is a lot of options but your decision now won’t limit you in the future to expand into a different area.
This series of blog posts will mainly focus on networking and a little bit on docker and servers.
I want to build a networking homelab
Alright, you made your choice to start a neworking homelab. So what do you exactly need to start? Well, this depends on how much money you want to spend.
Most modern network operating systems (NOS) can easily be emulated by a server, thus elimating the need to buy real hardware. But maybe a local business is closing down and they start selling old, used gear for cheap. Then go grab it. I will briefly talk about both options and how you could start.
I got two old EX2200-C
Great! Although these are “only” switches, they are actually capable of running some routing protocols as well thus making them the perfect start for learning how JunOS works.
There are only a few additional things you might need to get started. Namely a way to communicate with those devices. Junipe EX2200-C switches offer you the ability to use either an RS232 based serial to usb adapter (which most networking equipment supports) or even a simple mini-USB to USB-A cable, thus making it very simple to start configuring those devices. The only other thing you will need, as you might have guessed, is a PC and some ethernet patch cables.
Hold on, that was too quick for me
No worries, this is just an outline of what you need. In part 2 of this series, we will take a deeper look on how to get started with your setup. The only thing you need to do right now is to hunt on craigslist or ebay for some used networking gear. And feel free to buy whatever you want. I prefer Juniper devices, but you can get Cisco routers quite cheap as well, if you don’t care for gigabit speeds – remember, it is a lab for testing, not a production environment.
I got a server or old gaming computer
This will more likely be the case for most of us. And the great news is, that you can start your journey this way as well. There are some tools like Eve-NG, GNS3 or even Containerlab, which you can use to emulate real networking equipment for the fraction of the cost. If you like Juniper, they even offer some evaluation images for you. But be advised, that if you want to legally obtain software images, you need some accounts to download them.
If you do not have some older compute hardware, finding it online is also not that hard. Companies oftentimes throw away their 5 year old servers because they needed to upgrade them. But for network virtualization, they work fine. Just throw in some SSDs and a little bit of memory and you are good to go.
Please, not so quick!!!!
Sorry, habbit. But again, no worries. We will cover a virtual homelab setup in part 3 of this series. As with the hardware based lab, the only thing to do for you is to hunt down some compute. I just want to throw in some specs for you. You should get something at least this powerful:
- At least 8 cores (preferably 8 physical cores, but 4 physical and 4 virtual will get you started as well)
- At least 8 GB of memory, but please treat yourself good and invest in 16 GB. It makes your life easier
- At least 256 GB of SSD storage. HDDs do work, but with virtualization, you want a high number of I/Os per second and HDDs just aren’t fast enough
- Try to get more than one networking jack, if you want to connect real hardware to your setup. You can also add additional jacks via PCIE-cards.
If you grab a system like that, you should be pretty much ready to start your journey.
Alright folks, that’s all for this post. More on this topic in part 2. I hope you enjoyed it and if you’ve got any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below. Until next time!
