I have been wanting to set up my own home lab for a very long time. Unfortunately home projects and such have always been higher on the priority list so I hadn’t much luck getting it started. Thankfully I have been able to build my home lab with many thanks to my wife for delaying some projects.

The purpose of my lab is really simple. I want the ability to simulate many different environments for whatever project I am working on. I don’t need to support full sized production environments, such small base environments to operate against. For example one of my first projects will be setting up a XenApp server to develop some scripts against.

The obvious choice for the environment is for it to go virtual. I had toyed with the idea of using XenServer for my hypervisor since that is what I work with at work, but honestly having to pay for the memory optimization took it out of consideration. Memory is probably going to be the limiting factor in my environment. Thin Provisioning for local disks was another huge factor in my decision.

So now it was on to the hardware. I thought about buying a premade system, but decided I could get more bang for my buck by building my own and honestly a whole lot more fun.  It started with the case and power supply which I found on NewEgg on sale. The rest of the components I purchased from Micro Center.  It was the 4th of July and once I got started I didn’t want to have to wait to get building.

I overlooked the NIC card and realized after building it that the onboard NIC card wasn’t supported by ESXi so I ordered one from NewEgg and completed my system.

Currently I have a DC/DNS/DHCP server, a SQL server, a WSUS server, and a file server which serves as my lab infrastructure.

If you are interested here is the list of components in my Lab server and pictures from the building.