Patrick Domingues

This home lab is great for anyone who is just starting off their IT career and looking to get a step up in knowledge by chasing after it. If your a System Administrator already get yourself a lab anyways because the more you know the better.

Having a Home Lab builds your confidence because you obtain the technical know how for deploying new infrastructures. You gain confidence because you have created the environments you currently work with or you create a similar clients environment in your home lab then you learn what could happen and what will happen and how to go about troubleshooting or setups and migrations. As someone that has their own Home Lab I do know the benefits of it and what knowledge you would gain from it. As an employer I ask every interviewee if they have a home lab or not because this lets me know how serious they are to pursue self growth.

Home Lab Device List

This is a similar device list that I happen to use in my home Lab as well. If Unifi Network Equipment does not meet with your future network aspirations, I’m sure you will go with CISCO Enterprise network equipment which will be fine as well for your home lab.

	1x Unifi Controller	Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud Key (UC-CK)
	1x Firewall \ Router	Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway (USG)
	1x Network Switch	Ubiquiti Networks US-24 24-Port UniFi Managed Gigabit Switch with SFP
	1x Wireless AP	Ubiquiti Networks Unifi 802.11ac Dual-Radio PRO Access Point (UAP-AC-PRO-US)
	3x Dell R710 Servers	DELL PowerEdge R710 Server 2.40Ghz 8-Core 96GB 2X 512GB SSD
These three Dell servers will be great for Hyper-V and VMware Labs. It will be required for iSCASI storage setups and Clusters Configurations

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Patrick Domingues

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