A chat about home labs – World of EUC

We all know how important home labs are, for fun and for work, whether you’re testing a new technology, doing a test deployment, or learning something new to advance your career. Home labs can cost a lot, they can also cost very little. They can be large and include racks of servers, SANs, networking equipment, and backup power equipment, but they can also be small, nimble, and efficient. A home lab is what you make of it, it’s your lab. A lab to learn, enjoy, and have fun with. This podcast is kick off the chat about home labs for our upcoming insights webinar.

In this podcast, we’ll be talking about home labs. This includes experiences, costs, what we’re running and more:

Projects and use cases.
Lab location and considerations.
Hardware.
Software.
Career development.
Where labs meet the community.
Licensing.
Vendor community programs.

Thanks to Sean and Stephen for coming on to kick of the chat about home labs! We will be having our Insights Webinar: Home Labs on Friday, March 14th at 11AM EDT. You can find more information and register – Insights Webinar: Home Labs.

EUC World Amplify is August 4th to 7th in Minneapolis, MN. The earlier you register, the lower the registration price will be. You find more information and register – EUC World Amplify.

Jarian Gibson, Frontline Chatter Host:
Good day and welcome to the Frontline Chatter podcast. I am your host, Jarian Gibson, and I am back today with Sean Massey and Stephen Wagner again. And we are going to talk about a fun subject that kind of impacts us all and also has helped us grow in our careers. But before we get to that, how are you doing today, Sean?

Sean Massey, Frontline Chatter Co-Host:
I'm doing good. Jarian. It's kind of cold here in Wisconsin, as is, you know, as we record this. How are you doing?

Jarian Gibson:
Same. It's cold here as well. No school for the kids today. We are negatives with the windchill. My office is is warm, but there are some cold spots, so I have a heater up here to go along with my mini splits. But I guess we shouldn't complain, because Stephen over there in Canada probably gets it much worse than us. So how are you doing today, Stephen?

Stephen Wagner, Frontline Chatter Co-Host:
Cold. Cold. But I'm hanging in there. I've been on this work blitz for about a month and a half, so thankfully I've just been huddled in my apartment here. The heat cranked and, might jump on a plane and go somewhere a little bit warm when I get the opportunity. So just just hanging in there.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. Warmer climate does sound good, but the nice thing here is the cold here is only through the weekend or till Saturday. I think we're going to start warming up and be 55 on Monday. So this is kind of a quick little turnaround here for us. It was funny because it started off nice on the weekend, last weekend, and then Sunday night you could feel the cold come in and then Monday and then Tuesday night it got really bad. And then today. So yeah, it's kind of that quick turnaround. You know, that little sandwich of cold between two warm weeks of bread.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
But yeah today's conversation we're going to talk about home labs. So go ahead and kick us off Stephen.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. So we all know how important home labs are. You know, whether it's for fun or for work. Whether we want to test new technology, setting up a test deployment for something we're doing for work, or learning something new to advance our career. Home labs can cost a lot. They can cost very little. Little. You know, they can be very large and include racks full of servers, SAN storage units and networking equipment. But at the same time, they can also be super small, nimble, very efficient. Both on the wallet and on the power bill. And, you know, a home lab is what you make of it. It's your lab. It's a place to learn. It's a place to have fun. And, you know, with this podcast, we're hoping to jump into the topic of home labs and talk about experiences, costs, what we're running and more.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. And also too, after this podcast, we're going to have a follow up webinar, which is not really a webinar, but it's going to be an open community chat as well. So this podcast is going to set the stage for that, that conversation that we're going to have today and then to get others thinking about you know what they want to talk, talk about and bring in as far as relates to their home lab. So we have a list of topics here before we get into that. Any thoughts before we go, Sean?

Sean Massey:
No, I'm just looking forward to to this conversation and the, the the open conversation we're going to have with the community about home labs because, yeah, as as you guys have both said, this is a very important thing for for many of us in the field and, you know, we all have a lot, a lot to share lessons that we've learned. And I think this is kind of the, the kickoff to that, that bigger conversation.

Jarian Gibson:
So let's jump right in. But the first thing is, is like, you know, what is our purpose, right? Why? The question of why, you know, why do we want to do this? What projects and what use cases that we're going to look at. So let's start with Stephen on this one.

Stephen Wagner:
Oh, I've got a lot to say. Let me know when my time runs out. So for me.

Jarian Gibson:
I've got a buzzer. I'm just kidding.

Stephen Wagner:
The projects and use cases, you know, like when I was 19, I started my own company and that was I needed a lab to pretty much test, teach, educate myself everything that I was doing for customers. I needed to, to figure out how to do it. And I was young back then. So, you know, we're talking the most basic stuff. VLANs. We're talking I remember loading up VMware server. So back in the old days before ESXi when there was ESX, GSX and VMware server that ran on Linux. I was wanted to learn how to virtualize. I wanted to learn how to do storage. I was doing cool stuff with LIO Target before they implemented it into the Linux kernel. I didn't. I was curious what could be done. And so this started a huge exploration into the home lab territory. Fast forward to today. You know, now I have a VDI deployment. So I've got a full Horizon stack with App Volumes, SQL servers, Active Directory, Entra ID, and so the use cases in my eyes were endless. And so I'm still using it to educate myself, still using it to do test deployments. I'm going to stop myself from going on too much about this and hand it over to Sean.

Jarian Gibson:
Well, you don't want the (air horn sound).

Stephen Wagner:
Because that didn't have to be used.

Sean Massey:
Well, you know. Oh, we're going to we're going to have to, you know, edit this a little bit or just keep this in.

Jarian Gibson:
No. We're keeping it. We're having it's a fun conversation.

Sean Massey:
All right. So, you know, I've had a home lab now for probably close to 20, 25 years in in some respects. And like mine started for the same reasons that Stephen's did, which was, how do I learn new things? And I started mine in college. Right. I was going to school in an IT program for a four year degree. And yeah, we had some hands on time in the classroom. But, you know, that's very limited on on what you can learn and, and what you can do. And I wanted to know more. Right. It's like you get that first taste of doing something with Windows Server. And you know, there's so much more under the covers, but it's like you don't have time in class for it. So mine started with taking my old desktop and an old laptop that I had and just trying new things with it, like putting Windows Server 20, 20 or 20 3 or 2 2003. Wow. Putting Windows Server 2003 on it setting up file shares, you know, building an Active Directory, putting Linux on a on a machine just to to get the hang of it. And it kind of grew from there. And as time went on, it kind of scaled out. And as my journey through IT changed, my lab changed with it from just being something I could use to learn, to being something that I used to create content, to now morphing into something that's not only a learning environment for me, but also as something I can use to to self-host services and and replace expensive cloud services and use it for, you know, use it to save money in some respects, save money in theory on ongoing services that, you know, I'd have to pay a ton, a ton of money for, but that now I can, you know, turn around and give to my family. Like hosting Minecraft servers, which is also probably one of the biggest use cases in my lab these days.

Jarian Gibson:
I'm surprised I haven't gotten to that point yet because my kids do Minecraft. They play Roblox. The other stuff you know, they get on to. They have a lockdown Discord, which I'm thinking about hosting like a Discord style that for them instead. But yeah, mine started similar as well. As a teenager, I kind of, even before a teenager, I think even younger was more of learning how computers work. So building my own computer, sourcing the parts, that kind of stuff. It started there and then just loading, showing my age here, like DOS and Windows 3.1 and that kind of stuff, and then learning some basic programming stuff. And then I kind of got into like some side jobs of networking. So I was helping some some libraries and schools out with Apple networking setup and that kind of stuff. So going into that phase and then in my late teens, early 20s, I got into a role where I was doing tech support, but I had an opportunity to get replace a solution with, with end user computing to kind of help solve a problem where they were coming in through dial up and VPN and so forth. So then I started playing with Windows 2000 and Active Directory and, you know, Metaframe 1.8, Tarantella. A couple other solutions back in the day. And then from there just evolving as my career evolved. For the most part, I've kept a, a pretty big home lab over the years, especially when I was independent. Even when I was in consulting, the last couple of years, though, in my current role, though, I mostly used the internal lab resources because they're a lot more powerful. And for the stuff that I do, it does that. But I'm probably going to spin back up a smaller lab just for I'm playing with some starting to learn a little bit of development stuff too. So, you know, that probably will do a smaller lab for that. So yeah, so kind of similar pasts here. Similar use cases. You're you're over there smiling Stephen, so I know you got something to say.

Stephen Wagner:
I was just about to say it's not about the size of the home lab. It's about how you use it.

Jarian Gibson:
That's true. And I still have a rack here in my office. Like, right over here to my right. It's mostly powered off. The only things that are powered on in that room are pretty much my networking equipment for my office right now, but the servers are pretty much been powered off for a while, so.

Jarian Gibson:
So we kind of got projects in use cases, I think, you know, to kind of wrap that up. The biggest thing is, you know, more of, of learning, you know, curiosity, maybe doing things outside of your, your current role or things inside your current role where you might not have the resources or the time during the day as you're working, you know, with internal customers or external customers, to be able to, to, to get that hands on. And maybe you're doing that in the evenings, like some of us do on the weekends, or just whenever you have free time in between things.

Sean Massey:
Yeah, and one thing to add to this too, before we kind of go into the the rest of this conversation is whenever you're thinking about building a lab, I think all three of us kind of just fell into it, right? Like, we didn't necessarily all approach it with a purpose of this is what we want to do when we started it. It was kind of, oh, this is neat. I need to learn something and I want to have something quick to to do it. Today, like today, it's a lot easier to get hardware and software and and all the stuff that, you know, you may not have, you may not think of when you want to get into lab. So as we talk about like history and projects that we've done with it, one thing to keep in mind for yourself is what do I want to do with it? Right. Approach building a lab or if you have a small lab expanding it or, you know, growing it or replacing stuff. Approach that with a purpose, right? Think about what you want to do with your lab going forward, what you need to do or what you need to achieve that, and then use that to kind of build a plan. You're going to hear us talk about things like spouse acceptance factor. As you go through this. Right? Labs are an investment like anything else in your career, right? There's an investment. There's an investment of of time. There's an investment of money. There's an investment of space somewhere to do it, and possibly trade offs that go with that. And those are things you have to really think about as you go into it and, you know, you don't want to be going back to your spouse or your family going, hey, I need to buy two more servers to to do this. And, you know, I have to buy more hard drives and RAM or whatever, and kind of nickel and dime this. You want to think about what you need and plan for it appropriately.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. Also understand, you know, what kind of budget do you have as well? I think is the big thing. It's like, can I do I have a budget to go out and get everything I want. Can I look for for deals out there? Can I look where companies are possibly retiring hardware, where I might be able to get a good deal or just, you know, have the hardware outright in general? Go ahead, Stephen.

Stephen Wagner:
I was also going to say that if you do it all at once, not only can you help with the spousal acceptance factor, but you can also avoid having to turn on EVC mode in your cluster.

Sean Massey:
Yes. Or you have to plan very carefully when you go to expand.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Sean Massey:
All lessons that we've learned and, you know, sorry, I don't want to derail this part any more because actually, no, this is a good transition into the next thing we are going to talk about, which was location and considerations, number one of them being spouse acceptance factor. Right? But to kind of build off that, right, because this kind of goes hand in hand with it is, you know, we talk about locations, you know, it's are we just doing this at home? Are we hosting this somewhere in our house or somewhere on our property? Are you getting a colo? Are you going to just try to run everything in the public cloud? And all of those have trade offs. So, I run, Jarian, and you mentioned yours is in the room next to you, and you have kind of a shed quarters set up where it's at home, but it's not in your main house. Right?

Jarian Gibson:
It is now. Previously, it was my basement. But as the kids have gotten older, and they've taken over the basement or my basement is mostly video games and LEGO. Now, it did move up to here, so it's actually in its own little room, where you can't hear it. It's kind of sectioned off. Got a door, and it's got its own mini split, too. When I first built it. So it's cool. It's that kind of stuff. You can't hear it in here. But yeah, for the first, for the first couple of years here in my house, I was in the basement with it.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. Whereas mine isn't isn't my basement with me. So I have a basement office and it's on. It's got a door behind it. Right. It's under the stairs to my basement. There's a wall and a door, but mine isn't cooled. I don't have air conditioning in my house. So in the winter. In the winter, well, right now it's 68 degrees in there because it's like minus. Well, it's 13 degrees outside right now. So it's, you know, great natural cooling. But in the summer there's things, there's times I've had to turn things off because it gets to 100 degrees in there. And while I have, there's a the person who built this house decided they wanted to heat the garage. So there's a duct that runs through here to the garage. I have the, a fan and stuff in there to kind of dump heat into the garage, but in the summer it doesn't work very well. In the winter it works great. So, so that's one consideration right where you're going to run it. But then, the other noise obviously. Right? Depending on what you use for hardware, there's noise. You might want to buy a rack. Again going back to spouse acceptance factor, anything that arrives on a pallet you should get approval for. Yes, I have done that. Lessons learned learned from learned from our our mistakes. And then power. Right? Do you have power in that location? Do you have to run circuits? Do you have enough room on your your breaker box to, to install those circuits? Who's going to who's going to install it? Right? Those are all things that you, you have to consider. Now, the other side of that is you may save money having it at home for those trade offs. But if you want to go to the cloud, well, now you have an ongoing expense if you want. There are people who do their labs entirely in the cloud. There's people who have their labs in colos and, you know, they just justify it as as a self-improvement expense or as a learning expense.

Jarian Gibson:
Or an independent business expense.

Sean Massey:
Yep.

Stephen Wagner:
So, I could, I'm going to save the hardware discussion for later on when we jump into that, but I'm going to keep it short. So for example, with me, I guess you could say I take a more hybrid approach. So I have a workload sitting on Azure which is connected to my my main on prem network, which then has another site to site connection to my condo server. So, you know, three different areas and with, with everything that we've talked about here too. One thing that I want to point out is, safety is a big thing, especially if you have a family in the house. I've had dedicated rooms to lots of server equipment that have been air conditioned properly, and I've have had a situation where a power cord on an air conditioner ended up sparking and almost starting a fire. The only reason why I found out about it is because I started getting notifications from HPE ILO, telling me that the temperature has gone through the roof, making me go to the room to find out that there were sparks shooting off of the plug in for the air conditioner. So. So this is all very important stuff, and these are considerations that you have to take into when you design and deploy your home lab.

Sean Massey:
Mhm.

Jarian Gibson:
I was laughing earlier when Sean mentioned the palette thing, because there was that one time where when I was in the basement, and Shane Kleinert and I were doing a session for BriForum and we were doing all this testing of different monitoring solutions. It was part of our EUC bake off thing we did years ago. And somehow I think this is when Shane and I were both were at Choice or we, I was independent. He was still there. I can't remember around the timing of that, but, he somehow got Nutanix to send us, like, a whole rack of servers. Right. So we had probably about, I think, 8 or 12 nodes. So and that was the, the, the 2u four node models. So basically I think we had like 12 nodes of that to test with that. And I had like a 24u cluster or 24u rack. And so it showed up in a pallet and my wife was like, what the heck are you two doing? You know what's going on here? So the whole thing with the pallet showing up and the wife acceptance factor and so forth is a big thing, or whatever. So yeah, but the big thing I like you talked about is power too, because in my basement, I did have to add, I had enough room in my breaker box to add dedicated circuits. When I built my office up here, I actually planned out to have two separate circuits extra for the rack for the two the two power supply units for it. So, all the things that come into consideration, especially if you're going to go bigger. Now, if you're gonna go smaller and use things like, like the nucs or I know, like the Xeon D were popular for a couple of years or different things like that. I'm not getting too much in hardware, but it depends on the size and the scale. You might be okay with this normal power. But as you scale up, you definitely want to look at your power requirements, your cooling requirements, making sure you're able to facilitate that and understand what the impact is going to be to your utility bill as well.

Sean Massey:
Yep. Yeah. And one other thing to keep in mind about power. Right. You can mostly run your own electrical circuits, but you have to understand, like wiring types. Like what gauge wire are you running? And does that match up with the breaker you're putting in? And does it match up with the outlets that you're installing in your room? Right? There's a whole bunch of stuff around electrical code that you kind of have to keep in mind. So, like, if you're running a 20 amp circuit for your lab, right? You have to put in 20 amp outlets. You have to use the I believe it's the yellow sheath on the the wire. Righ?. And you want, you know, make sure it's grounded properly and all those things. Right? So you may want to consider an electrician if this is something you're not comfortable doing to get it done right. Because like Stephen said, right. You don't you don't want to have like a fire that that comes out of this.

Stephen Wagner:
And just as a disclaimer, we're not telling you to do anything.

Sean Massey:
No.

Stephen Wagner:
What we're telling you to do is consult a professional if you need to modify any of the power and the wiring inside of your household.

Sean Massey:
Yes, yes, definitely consult a professional. Right. Like if especially if you're not comfortable with any of this. But then there's also right to Jarian's point about equipment right. And power usage. Right. There's UPS's you can buy, you can get used. That would be great for a home lab. Except they have some, you know, high, high amperage plug on them. Right. Twist lock plugs or weird looking prongs on them that are 30 amp or 50 amp plugs that are things you're not going to run yourself. Right. And but you have to keep that in mind when you're looking at equipment, especially used equipment. So I think this is a good point to transition into hardware.

Jarian Gibson:
And one more thing. Before we do that real quick, Stephen had a good point too about his hybrid. So I know internet today is pretty much, you know, the standard. Everyone's getting high speed, but you don't always have the option of high speed everywhere. There are still places who don't have like I'm fortunate here where when Google rolled out fiber, I think we were like the first city to get Google Fiber, and it started here before they went around. So I have Google Fiber Plus another backup one since I work 100% from home now. But making sure that if you're going to have any kind of hybrid lab that, you know, you have proper connectivity if you're going to do any kind of remote access into it, you know, does your ISP allow any of that kind of stuff coming into your environment? Do you have can you get static IPs? Do you have to use dynamic DNS? You know, those type of things too, are other considerations whether you're going to do it at home or on prem? I'm sorry. At home, in the cloud or in a hybrid model like Stephen does. I just want to throw that out there before we move on to hardware.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's one thing we didn't talk about is internet connectivity and all all that goes with that. And there are still a lot of places, especially in the US, where high speed isn't high speed or it's high speed relative to that area. So yeah, another another good consideration is, yeah. What's your internet connection like?

Jarian Gibson:
I think they just launched like ten gig or 25 gig. You can get here now. It's like 8, 10 or 25 or something. They just did. I have two and a half as my primary. But yeah, they're getting to where you can actually get it. It's not that too expensive either. I can actually look it up while we talk about hardware. I'll look it up real quick. But yeah, I think the next step would be hardware. Who wants to kick that one off?

Sean Massey:
So, Stephen, why don't you. Why don't you take us through hardware and, you know, kick this off?

Stephen Wagner:
So when it comes to hardware, what? You know, I do want to share the details of my lab, but I want to start this particular subtopic off. Take advantage of what's what's out there. There is a lot of equipment that you can find at technology recycling companies. You can go on eBay. And the one really nice heartwarming thing about this is that these servers have some of them have such a long history, like, you know, you can go and pick up a server for your home lab, whether it's like a DL360 or something like that. It's got some history. It was doing financial transactions for a bank or doing something for a large organization, and now it could become part of your home lab. And it's nice because by purchasing used equipment, you avoid the stuff from getting thrown into a landfill or from becoming e-waste, which is a problem that is plaguing all of us. It's something that we should be very aware of. But it's nice that, you know, you can find all this different hardware that you can bring into your lab. It's great too, because you actually get to play with the hardware that large organizations are using. You get to play with hardware that you're potentially going to be deploying when you learn this technology, if you're purchasing it for, for learning. Now with with me, with my, my case is a little bit different because I actually, you know, I need to have a lab with current equipment. So quite a bit of my stuff I've purchased new, but I've been using it for a long time. So with my main on prem home lab, I've got a couple old HPE DL360 G8's dual processors each. I think each has ten cores. In one of the servers I've got an NVIDIA A2, the other server, I've got an L4. It's kind of interesting. I had to go into a secret engineering menu to enable this 64 bit memory space for it. I think I'm creeping up to just under a terabyte of of Ram. I've got UPS's. I've got a I used to have an HPE MSA San, but I decomm'ed it because Synology has been pretty nice to me and has been hooking me up with some gear. So I've got a Synology device that I'm using with dual ten gig. I've got ten gig switching, redundant ten gig switching, using UniFi for that, and.

Sean Massey:
So I'm.

Stephen Wagner:
Go for it.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. You finish Stephen. I just want to throw in a little disclaimer of right. We mentioned we've been doing this for a long time. If you are new to home labbing don't feel you have to jump into the deep end right away. This is this is stuff that gets built up over time. And going back to what we said at the beginning, you know, think about what you want to do and build to that and then build up. Sorry, Stephen, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I wanted to get that piece in as you started talking about, you know, like, redundancy and sands and things like that.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah, that that's a good point. That's when I first started this, when I was 19 and started actually investing. I just picked up an ML350 and I got some Cisco switch to turn on VLANs, and I was running 4 or 5 virtual machines. And that was great for like 6 or 7 years. And then I incorporated it into future lab designs. So start off basic, start off with one server, pick up a NUC, and then over a period of time you can invest a crazy amount of money, you know, that might potentially result in a divorce and go into the deep end. Pick up all the servers, deploy your Azure lab, connect it with the site to site. You know, like here at my condo, I've got another HPE ML server. I'm not sponsored by HPE. Just by the way. With another Synology unit, I've got some Ubiquiti ten gig switch at my foot, and I've got that site to site to, to where all my main on prem gear is. And so it's it racks up quite a power bill. Some utility companies report power usage to the authorities. Thankfully, I've never had any surprise visits due to my power usage.

Jarian Gibson:
Oh, yeah. You're growing something over there.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. But but it's it's great because this is a perfect learning lab where I can learn, I can deploy test environments, and I'm going to stop talking now and hand it over to someone else to to share.

Jarian Gibson:
Well, I want to do a follow up to you so I can get one, two, 5 or 8 here. And so correction I currently have two not two and a half, but it's 150 bucks a month for eight gig fiber I can get here.

Stephen Wagner:
That's that's crazy.

Jarian Gibson:
I'm not going to use it. You know. You know, I'm not gonna use five gig. You know, I don't think I've ever used it enough to use two gig, but it's it's crazy. You know, depending where you are, what kind of speeds you can get to your house. But, you know, with those speeds, too, when it comes to hardware, you have to make sure you have the proper networking equipment. Can your networking equipment take advantage of that? Like I use a Ubiquit Networks as well, not sponsored by them. From all my networking gear. But you got to make sure that whatever router that you have, I know most of them will give you the router to come in, but are you going to use that amount of bandwidth? You know, does it have the features like I have one of the the one of the gateways where I can do I think, up to five gig on it, but I do two gig. But then as you turn features on that may reduce your throughput on that device like, you know, firewall and IDs, IPS, that kind of stuff. So, you got to consider that also when it comes to your hardware. For me and most of my stuff I've gotten off eBay or I've gotten off recycled stuff, most of it is Supermicro, I have a couple Dell in my rack. Still, I think I still have like K1 and K2 cards sitting in the boxes over there on the rack that those things, like I said, are powered off because I don't use them anymore. But yeah, like like you were saying, look for eBay, look for sales. You'll see a lot of places where there's hardware liquidation and you can get like those, those bulk things from from eBay or even locally. I know those in the community have given stuff away or donated stuff as well, which I've been on the receiving end of that also. So, you know, look out there, make some friends in the community. Even, you know, maybe you might want to team up with a couple people and have, like a community based lab, maybe, you know, you all chip in to co-locate it somewhere or have someone host it and chip in for the hardware and chip in for the utilities. But you know, other ways to where you can kind of have, you know, a shared community lab, also, when it comes to the hardware or the hardware. And one more thing too, before I hand over to Sean was, if you don't have, you know, the room or the space or, you know, you want to make sure that you're getting newer hardware all the time, that's where cloud might be a good place for you to rent it, for you to use it and then power it down. The other thing, too, is that some of these community programs, or even if you do like certain subscriptions of software, they might come with cloud credits that you can use also to kind of help offset those costs. If you're going to look at using cloud as a location versus having your own hardware in your house. And then the last thing is that now with everything getting smaller and more powerful, it's easier to get a nice, you know, robust lab without having to have a bunch of large gear, in your house as well. I'll hand it over to Sean.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. So, those are all really good points. And I think 1 or 2 of those I want to save till we talk about software. Because you mentioned, like, subscription programs and cloud credits and things like that. But I'm kind of in a similar boat to Stephen, right? Like, I have a rack of stuff. All my stuff is old, off leased Dell hardware because I got comfortable with Dell's iDRAC interface and decided that's what I want to use going forward. So I have like, a couple R630s, a couple R430s. I'm trying to get out some of the old R6, R620's that I have. I'm in the process of decommissioning some of those. I have gone a lot more. Well, I have a couple of like Synology and Qnap and I have something running true NAS for for storage, but I'm in the process of moving more towards Hyperconverged. I'll talk about that more in the when we get to software. But yeah, it's I use a lot of old off lease recycled gear. Some of it I got on eBay, some of it I got from like places like Tech Mike New York and other other hardware refurbishers where you could kind of get like a custom built to order, which, by the way, is not that expensive for used and off lease gear. So you get what you want and you know it. You know it matches what else you have to avoid things like having EVC turned on or having different, you know, processor speeds and core counts on each host. I also use UniFi for my networking stack. Here's the thing about UniFi, right? Like, they have good gear. It's not terribly expensive. And you get an easy to use management interface with it. And you can build a full network stack if you choose to use all their stuff. Right. You can have Wi-Fi plus switching plus firewall if you choose to use it all. I don't use everything that they have. Some of my networking is completely virtualized. But right there, ten gig switches were too good to pass up for for what you got. So none of us are sponsored, by the way. Like I'm again, throw that disclaimer out there. We we just all found something really good that that we use. One other thing to keep in mind as you as you plan hardware, and that's around the drives you put in your, in your devices. Right. If you're using, you know, NUCs or old desktops or whatever, you know, any drive will work because it's a SATA drive. Once you start getting into the more enterprise grade gear, they get to be a little bit pickier, right? A SATA drive, you know, a cheap one terabyte SATA drive. You know, something off brand or, you know, one of those. I don't even know what the names of the brands are, but, you know, you get them for like 50 bucks on Amazon, right? They'll work great in a desktop. You plug it into a server, you start getting, you know, yellow flashing lights on on some of those drives. So you have to be a little bit more picky about your drives. But then that's also where eBay and, and hardware recyclers or hardware disposal companies come into play. You can find good deals on SAS SSDs that came out of, that came out of SANs that were recycled. Right. You know, you can get them for for cheap and get better capacity with it, you know, same for network cards and other components you would you might need. You know, just because you buy a server doesn't mean you have to, you know, buy everything in the server at the same time. You can go out and find the card you need and add it later. So, Stephen, you had something you wanted to add in?

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah, just a couple of things too, is that, you know, have fun with the project and make sure you do your research. Like, for example, a lot of us, some of us might be picking up enterprise sands and throwing them into our home lab. But there's amazing alternatives like with Qnap or Synology NAS. One common thing that I see, if we want to get into the technical nitty gritty, is that there's a lot of home labs that will try to deploy iSCSI, for example, with Synology or Qnap, and then they start getting timeout requests, and they blame the the hardware that they're using. And Sean, to your point about making sure that you're using the right drives, the reason why like, I see a lot of folks having issues with this, and it's actually just because the drives that they put inside of their NAS device are they don't they're hitting iSCSI timeouts on their IO requests. And so it's not actually the device that they're using. It's because they put in the wrong drives. Or if they slapped in a couple NVMe SSD cache drives into it, they would be able to avoid hitting the the iSCSI timeouts. And that's one of the reasons why enterprises use like these sands is because you're not going to hit those timeouts because you're using high performance disks. But when it comes to home labs, you have to just keep small stuff like this in mind, which again, keeps it fun. But just make sure that you you do your research.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, yeah I agree with that as well. And you know, especially when you get into this hardware like you were saying, hardware compatible hardware compatibility list, you know vendor recommended drives, all those things will come into factor. So make sure you look at those and you mentioned UniFi. They even have over ten gig now. Like you can get ten gig pretty economical. But they're even getting up there in like 25 and 100 gig now. And their networking and I run pretty much the whole stack here as well. I run their cameras and stuff. Also, I'm waiting to get their security stuff. Now they're getting new sensors out coming out here. I'm going to probably throw those around my house too, as well. ut leBt's go ahead and move into to software, so I'll kick that one off. Software? It depends. Right. Some some vendors have community programs where you get their software. Sean mentioned HCI is becoming popular in labs. You can get things like Nutanix Community Edition. I know if you're part of, like, the Omnissa Insiders, they probably give you guys software. I know through CTP program we had access to software, but the CTP program and CTA program is no longer there. So it depends, you know, what you're doing. A lot of these community programs out there can help you get access to software to allow you to test it in a non-production scenario. But I know even getting trial stuff, sometimes companies will even give you trial stuff in exchange for maybe writing a blog or a review or honest feedback as well. So don't always think that you have to pay for software to get these labs. And there's things like subscriptions too, right? I mentioned subscriptions for getting cloud credits. Those same subscriptions can get like MSDN, for example, can get you also access to the software too as well. Or you can also use trial software as well. You just have to keep rebuilding it. And that's where things like automation or other things come into play as you're building these labs out. And I'll hand this over to to Sean for the next part of this for software.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. So, you know, let's let's start on that community programs and subscription piece first. Right. There are programs with vendors. Some of them are, you know, based on your involvement in the community, that will get you access to to software. Others are things that you would have to pay for as a subscription. Now, this used to be a lot easier, right? You know, I'm not going to lie about this, right? And say, oh, yeah, it's great. Like, it used to be a lot easier. There used to be things like TechNet from Microsoft that, you know, was great. You got access to servers, not just like you got Windows desktop, Windows Server, Office, SQL, all the all the all the stuff like SQL and exchange and all that. The problem is, a lot of those programs were ruined by people in the community who decided, oh, I'm going to now resell some of these keys I'm not using. Right. So there were a lot of really good things that got ruined from these programs. So it's a lot harder to get licensing now. The same on like, if you work a lot with VMware right there, VMware or excuse me, VMUG Advantage is still around, but the biggest benefit of VMUG Advantage now requires a certification in order to get access to the license. So that's that's one piece of this, right? The programs that do exist, though, typically are a lot more expensive or have additional gates behind them to get licensing because companies have been burned in the past. So keep that in mind as you're looking at things right. Like MSDN, I think it's like the the lowest tier subscription that gets you access to some of the the software, if it still exists, was like $600 a year.Right? So keep that in mind. The flip side of that is there's a lot of free stuff out there that you can use. You can use, like, I've been moving my lab to Nutanix Community Edition, which is a free, a free version of Nutanix product that has, you know, some limitations, like the maximum number of hosts. It's essentially the same software as the commercial Nutanix products, but they do things a little bit differently, which has also been a really fun thing to learn. In order to, you know, do some stuff in my lab, there are things like, well, Linux, right? You can deploy any or almost any variation of Linux in your lab for free. Right. And then there's all sorts of tools around that that are open source and free to use. And then even on top of that, there's a lot of open source alternatives to to enterprise applications and cloud services that if you want to learn concepts and fundamentals, you can put those in. So I mentioned earlier, I self-host a lot of stuff. So I'm using things like ownCloud to have to host my own OneDrive alternative or Google Drive alternative. I'm using, you know, PDFs or Opnsense, is an open source firewall. There's all sorts of other self-hosted applications. Service desk I have a Miro alternative that I host and things like that that, you know, are teaching me about, you know, hosting my own applications and building out, you know, those kinds of services and tying them all together with an open source identity provider. So this is a huge rabbit hole. And there's a lot that you can once you start looking, there's a lot of stuff you can start doing with this, whether it's infrastructure software that is open source or open source applications.

Stephen Wagner:
Sean, you hit the nail on the head. You hit the nail on the head. What I'll do is I'll just expand into a couple of those items. Um, so for a lot of us, especially with some of the folks in in World of EUC, there's quite a few consultants. And so the thing is that from the, from my point of view, as a, as a consultant and for a lot of others, you can pick up like, for example, if you you can sign up to become a Microsoft partner, you get access to the Action Pack, which is going to be discontinued soon. They now have the cloud AI program, which gives you a whole bunch of licenses that you can use. Internal use. I think depending on the tier, you even get like a Windows 365 desktop in the cloud as part of it. And then you can also partner with other companies, like, for example, like I have a partnership with Sophos. So I get, I can deploy Sophos. Yeah. NFR's. Some of the NFR's allow internal use, some don't, depending on the organization that you're getting it from. For example, like with VMware by Broadcom, they have NFR's. Those can't be used for internal use. They're only for demo training purposes. So keep that in mind. But there's a whole bunch of this is just an example of how there's a whole bunch of different routes that you can take to get entitled software deployed in your home lab. And if you contribute to the community, such as blogging, making videos, you'd be surprised companies will reach out and want you to try their hardware. Try their software. And then just jumping into the open source stuff, a lot of enterprises use open source, so don't, don't focus on a single solution or software.

Jarian Gibson:
And I think that kind of gets us into career development. Because you don't want to, like you said, don't focus on a single solution or a single software because, you know, that's where career development comes in, whether it's in your current role or you're looking to to expand that. I know some people in on the EUC side, I'll call Andrew Morgan out, who was big on the EUC side for a long time, started getting into programming and is now on the AI side as well. So, you know, don't limit yourself to to single like solutions or single mindsets, you know, look at how you can grow within the role that you're within. Or if you want to expand out to a different role, you know, all these things come into play. And I know, you know, doing things like dev on the side or looking at AI or, you know, figuring out how a new use case can bring into your company or your role to help things out. All those things can help with career development. You know, that's how I did with me starting early was, you know, getting into end user computing that was going from help desk into an admin role and rolling out end user computing in a company was my first early example of career development. So kind of think about how you can use these things. What can you do? How can you branch out to to learn more, but also possibly take the next step in your career development?

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah, yeah.

Sean Massey:
Yeah, I'd agree strongly with that. And we should also put a little caveat. When you mention Andrew Morgan, it should be Andrew Morgan who used to be in the EUC space. And my former podcast host.

Jarian Gibson:
Yes. Oh yes. He was. Yes. And before you say what that we I need to put a post on this because we, I just saw we were ten years in to Frontline Chatter. So I need to post about that. So thank you. Yes he was the original co-host with me. Like we started this together just over just over ten years ago here now. So.

Sean Massey:
Yeah, it's hard to believe it's been ten years. But, you know, back on on to that. On to the point about career development, right? Once I got out of college and started getting traction in my career. Right. My lab was huge for that because, again, there were things I wanted to learn that I wasn't going to learn at work, that were relevant to my job. But then the other interesting thing that happened is I started writing about things. Right? I started blogging, and my lab kind of became that sandbox to develop content for my blog. So I had in much in the way you ended up in EUC, right? Like I got hired at a place that was doing a, it wasn't Horizon at the time. It was VMware View. It was a VMware View deployment. Never touch the stuff. And the contractor that they had hired to deploy it all got bought in. Most of their people left, so I had to kind of learn how to do this. So having a home lab, you know, building out a vSphere environment, you know, helped with that. But then it also got me blogging even more because nobody at the time had really written about it. So now it's on to developing content and using the lab to generate that. And the really interesting thing, and I think you'll find amongst all of us here on the recording, is the minute we went from just using our home lab to sharing what we knew, whether it was through writing or presentations or podcasts, our career started to change significantly. It having that out there made it easier for us to to apply for jobs and go, oh, you want to see what I can do here? Look at my blog, right? Oh, you're really interested in learning about this? Well, come see my presentation at this VMUG meeting or this CUGC meeting or this conference. Right. So.

Jarian Gibson:
Or World of EUC.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. EUC World Amplify. Not too late. It opens doors for you, to to be able to to create content. Whether, you know, whether it's somebody seeing your blog and wanting, you know, wanting to talk to you about an opportunity, even if it's just to develop more content, like Stephen said, or it opens actual doors hrough connections in the community to, to getting jobs. Right. It it's something that if you're going to build a lab, as long as your employer doesn't prohibit it, find a way to share what you know. And it's getting easier to do that as time goes on back in, you know, 2010 is when I started my blog, right? It was forums and blogs, and I think that even kind of predated Twitter. Twitter a little bit. Now it's all sorts of social media, podcasting, blogging, uh, YouTube and other video sites, hosting your own webinars. You can do all these things and share what you know. And once you start sharing what you know, the easier it becomes to to make connections. The way I like to put this is, you know, people always say it's not what you know, it's who you know, but people won't do things for you if they didn't think you knew what you were doing. So it's it's both. All right. So Stephen.

Stephen Wagner:
Gees career development, you know, I don't know, 18 years ago, deploying VMware for the first time in my home lab, learning how VLANs worked, learning how vSwitches worked. You know, fast forward to ESXi and vCenter. You know, we're talking distributed switches. All of that I learned how to do in my home lab, which led to creating blog posts, which led to business development customers for my business. Fast forward, you know, ten years ago, how did I get into VDI? I was at a point where I needed to learn a new piece of technology. I was wondering what's next? And I put in a request for an NFR for at the time, VMware Horizon downloaded it, and I disappeared for four weeks into my home lab, and I, I learned everything, I learned what VDI is persistent non-persistent instant clones, I learned application deployment, and I blogged about everything that I was learning. And then once I learned it, it wasn't enough. I needed to learn how to break it. Which led to more blog posts, which led to career development opportunities, business opportunities. And here I am today where I'm in the VDI trenches, trenches, non-stop, doing amazing cool projects, doing things with GPUs, you know, the conversations leading on to AI and all of this was it started off with the home lab.

Sean Massey:
Mhm.

Jarian Gibson:
And then one thing to you mentioned about, as far as learning and doing things to a lot of us, you know, either at one time or currently are consultants, whether we're independent or whether we were, working for a solution provider. But in those roles, you're a jack of all trades, right? You know, you'd be working on Citrix today. Omnissa tomorrow. Parallels the next day. So, you know, having those labs kind of helps you because you never want to go into a project blind. Right. You never want to want to go in there and kind of, you know, that, you know, that Leroy Jenkins mentality where you're just going to go without planning. You kind of want to make sure that you understand what you're doing and be able to install it and not, you know, waste your time or waste the customer's time to make sure that you're meeting those expectations and have that knowledge. Because as you go into those customers, they expect you to have that knowledge, to answer questions, to be a guiding hand for them. So that's where that career development comes in as well, is because you have to understand that. And then, you know, just by blogging and forums and that kind of stuff, that community aspect, a lot of us have become friends with the community, whether it's been at events or writing blogs or forums or that kind of stuff. That's how we've all kind of come around and got to know each other with those avenues. So it's not just only career development, but it's also making those connections that can also help your career development or just be, a friend or a voice or someone to mentor or that kind of thing as well. So those also come into mind. Stephen. Yes. Anything else you wanted to add?

Stephen Wagner:
And on the topic of mentorship. It's not just about established professionals focusing on career development, but it's also about getting youth into getting excited about technology. Whether, like Sean, your example about having a laptop and starting off with a laptop as a home lab, you can do you could deploy a hypervisor on a laptop. And so if you have someone that's in high school or even younger, like I was doing some crazy stuff when I was like 13 years old. If you empower people with a lab and a their own place, something that they can call their own, their own environment and, and just let them play, amazing things will happen. Like it's just it's the possibilities are endless there. They'll learn, they'll get excited, they'll share. Sean?

Sean Massey:
So yeah, that's a great point. One other thing I wanted to to point out too, since we're talking about, you know, sharing with the community, right? You know, there was a time when there weren't very many voices on certain topics when it came to blogging about technology. Nowadays, there's a lot. But that shouldn't stop you from writing your own perspective. Right. You're getting into your lab. You're doing something. You're doing your use case. Maybe you're doing something a little bit unique or novel with what you're doing. Maybe you're following somebody else's guide and you come across something you've never seen before. Write about it anyway, right? It doesn't matter if somebody else has covered it. Right? You know, Stephen mentioned, you know, he was blogging about what he was learning when he was trying to learn Horizon. Well, you know, there have been people who've written about it. I've written about doing a zero to end horizon deployment. Carl Stallwood has, the vendor has their own, you know.

Jarian Gibson:
Tech zone or.

Sean Massey:
Tech zone, deep documentation on it outside of the regular documentation, right? Doesn't stop anybody from writing their perspective and how they did it and how they approached the problem, because there's always something you can learn when some when you share what you know.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
So we kind of already transitioned into where lab meets the community. Are there any other thoughts on that? Because I feel like we kind of covered that by, by the last part of the conversation. So was there anything else you guys wanted to add about where lab meets the community?

Sean Massey:
No, I, I think we're good.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. Just reiterating the fact that get involved in as many community programs as you can. It it'll enable you from a knowledge perspective as well as potentially a licensing perspective.

Sean Massey:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
And speaking of licensing, we kind of already talked about that as far as getting access to things. Whether it's through community programs, whether it's through any subscription type services, whether it's just reaching out or or writing about it to where they reach out to you to get your perspective. Did you guys have any other thoughts on licensing as far as labs?

Sean Massey:
Yeah. So the one thing I'll add is don't write off open source stuff. There is a lot of really good open source alternatives out there. And I'm not just talking about like Linux and Postgres SQL. If there's something you want to do, there's a chance that somebody else got tired of paying somebody for it and wrote their own thing, and that's a good way to go if you just want to learn concepts. Right. You depending on what you're doing, you may or may not need like Windows or Microsoft SQL Server. But if you don't have a hard requirement for it, don't let that stop you. Because using an open source solution, even if it's just Linux is going to, you know, help round out your skill set and teach you a lot more and help you approach problems from a different perspective, even if it's only getting comfortable with a command line.

Jarian Gibson:
Stephen, any more thoughts on licensing?

Stephen Wagner:
Just for those who might be listening, it might be worthwhile to list off a couple programs that we're all aware of, like for example, with the with VMUG Advantage and the vExpert program right now. If you get, I believe it's VVF VCP, you get vSphere standard, and if you get VCP, VVF certified, you get access to VVF lab licenses. Sean, I think you mentioned Nutanix Community Edition.

Sean Massey:
Yeah. Nutanix Community, Nutanix Community Edition, which is available. There's a forum out on the Nutanix .Next community site where you have to register to get access to it. But it's basically, you know, I'm going to step a little bit on Jarian's toes here because he works for Nutanix, but it's basically full fledged Nutanix with some limitations on it. And unlike full fledged Nutanix, it doesn't pass through the storage controller because it's designed to run on anything or even nested. There's, I'm trying to think if there's there are a ton of other programs out there. And another thing too, cloud free tier, right? Microsoft has a free tier for Azure. Amazon has a free tier for AWS. There's a free tier for Google Cloud, a free tier for Oracle Cloud. Right. Take advantage of those as well.

Stephen Wagner:
Veeam has a community edition. I believe you get 20 licenses with your community edition. No support.

Sean Massey:
There's two actual there's a ten license community edition, and then there is a 20 license edition for certified professionals. So if you have, like, a VCP or an MCSE or MCI, whatever Microsoft is, right. You can you can get a more advanced license.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Sean Massey:
And then other backup vendors also have free editions or community editions as well.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. So Synology units have active backup for business. You pick up an appliance, you've got access to that. Are we missing any other big ones that.

Sean Massey:
Well, you know, on that topic of like Synology and Qnap, they have a lot of functionality built into those devices for free.
Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Sean Massey:
So if you are looking to invest in something for your lab, that is something to definitely take a look at in terms of what you get out of the box, because there is a ton of functionality you can take advantage of.

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
And then we kind of mentioned community programs a little bit. Do you want to go any more about vendor community programs or are we if we feel we cover that pretty well?

Sean Massey:
I, I think the only thing I would reiterate with vendor community programs is oftentimes it really depends on the vendor. Sometimes they have requirements to be invited into those programs or, or you have to apply for them to be considered, look into them. Right. If there's technology that interests you, look into that program, find out what it takes, and, you know, work towards it. The worst they can say is no.

Jarian Gibson:
And a lot of these, the vendors, especially in the EUC space, you know, have some kind of a software or some way that you can, you know, use their software pretty easily as well. You know, they want you to test it out. They want the feedback. They want people writing about it so they see it as, you know, kind of if more people are talking about it, they're giving us feedback is not only helping us get the word out, but it's also helping us improve our product as well. So if you don't see anything out there on their site, you know, don't be shy to reach out to someone you know or someone you see posting. If you're in the World of EUC Slack as well, we have many channels in there for the different EUC vendors. Feel free to ask in there also, because a lot of those vendors are in those channels also, and they're either helping, or they're putting information out there as well. You something you wanted to add, Sean?

Sean Massey:
Yeah. You know, and so you mentioned World of EUC there. There's one world of EUC sponsor in particular I want to highlight now there's three that are really good about this. IGEL has a like a free one license copy of their solution. 10ZiG has a free one license copy of their solution. But kind of the gold standard in the EUC space is Liguidware, they have a five license community edition of their Command Control product, which, you know, we it's an IT person, you're eventually going to get called on to provide support for a family member. It's this is a five licensed SaaS version of of their product, for monitoring and remote support. Put it on your your parents PC or your kid's PC. And then when they have problems, you have a tool already, you know, up up to five users to be able to help them. So and that one is, you know, five users free for for anyone in the community. So definitely worth checking out. It's called Liquidware Command Control.

Stephen Wagner:
It's really nice how out of all the different, I guess you could say subcategories of or fields inside of information technology that the the VDI and EUC community is the most open as far as knowledge sharing and also licensing programs for the community. Because this this isn't something that you see in other subfields.

Jarian Gibson:
So as we kind of wrap things up and wind things down here, we are going to have an upcoming. It's not really a webinar. It's going to be more of like an open dialogue session to have this the next evolution of this chat about about home labs and, you know, this, this on this topic. So this podcast is kind of serving as kind of like a way to think about it, kind of help you kind of get the conversation, help us get the conversation started. So, look forward to the dates of that upcoming session. You know, bring your thoughts and ideas because, you know, everyone's got different ways they approach the home lab and so forth. So we're looking forward to that. Before we close things down, any additional thoughts, Sean?

Sean Massey:
Well, you know, have fun with this, right? You know, if you're thinking about having a home lab, have fun with it. I had another thought, and I completely lost it a second ago, and I'll probably remember it as soon as we wrap up.

Jarian Gibson:
Stephen?

Stephen Wagner:
Just again, have fun with your home lab. There's no right or wrong way to do it. Don't judge others on their home labs. Just listen to what's happening and use it when you build your own. And with the, the general meet that we're going to have coming up with the home lab. Save some questions. If you have any questions about your home lab, feel free to bring it up. When we schedule the, the open dialogue and the discussion. If you want to share your home lab photos, bring it all.

Jarian Gibson:
Also, any of our sponsors or other EUC vendors out there, you know, please feel free to join as well. You can provide any kind of stuff for people getting access to software for their home lab. So we're always welcomed to anyone to have that, that dialogue live with. Sean, do you remember what you forgot?

Sean Massey:
Nope.

Jarian Gibson:
Are we good? Okay. Well, thank you all for listening to the Frontline Chatter podcast, brought to you by the World of EUC. World of I'm sorry, not World of EUC. EUC World Amplify registration is open. Call for papers is closed. We are working through the call for papers to announce those, those, those speakers slots here pretty soon. But make sure if you plan on attending, you know, you know, the sooner you attend, the better price you get for the attendance. It will be in August in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And we're going to have a little bit more time this year based on the feedback next last year. So look forward to that. All the information is on World of EUC dot org, and for myself and Sean and Stephen, thank you for listening to the Frontline Chatter podcast and we'll talk to you next time.

Sean Massey:
All right.

Stephen Wagner:
Thanks everyone.