HomeLab

Until recently I have used my primary desktop as a virtual machine host. This generally works pretty well for anything that I am ok with standing up and shutting down on a regular basis, like small networking demos and troubleshooting issues.

I start to see issues when I want to collect data over a period of time. With the way Windows 10 forces updates, bringing down my hosted VM lab with it, I have finally invested in a couple of small servers so that I can host a hypervisor on them in the lab and run a couple of log and packet collection servers to collect data, as well as migrate anything that isn’t expected to be short lived into the long-term hypervisors. I do not intend to retire my VMWare Workstation/Fusion labs for things that I am standing up and tearing down regularly.

My HomeLab is the environment that I use to test out new tools and software, test out configurations, double-check implementation processes, and do vulnerability research. It also has a “production” side which is used to serve my home’s networking needs with media streaming, document sharing/versioning, and system/media backups.

Equipment

I use a mix of proprietary systems and open-source. It is a mixed environment with gear that I work with most often including:

• FortiNet Equipment
  • FortiGate
  • FortiSwitch
  • FortiAP
  • FortiAuthenticator
  • FortiManager (doubling as a FortiAnalyzer too)
• Workstations
  • Apple Macbook
  • Windows 10 Host
• Hypervisors
  • ProxMox
  • VMware
    • Workstation
    • Fusion
  • Nutanix AHV
  • OpenStack

Network Layout

The Environment is split into two major segments:

• “Production” side of the environment which hosts my personal photos, documents, media, etc. This still hosts some of my lab equipment/software in the desktop VMware environment.
• “Lab” - Most of this part of the environment is not fully deployed yet but it will be holding the hypervisors, 10G networking, an access point, as well as most of my infrastructure Virtual machines.

Some things that I am hoping to accomplish in the future:

• Migrate my VM infrastructure to dedicated hypervisors from my temporary desktop Type2 Hypervisors
• Migrate my “Production” systems to container based management
• enable VXLAN L2 span from workstation to Hypervisors to facilitate mixed Hypervisor Lab (KVM/Proxmox + VMware)
• Push some of my working toolset to my Git Repo