I don’t have many servers or a massive equipment lab. So, my goal is to build a small, fast, powerful, quiet home lab that doesn’t take much power. My dream goal is to completely power my home lab with solar and/or wind power and find practical uses for the heat produced by the servers. Later, for example, I will design my own house as a data center in which the generated heat from equipment is used for keeping the house warm.
VMware LAB
3x Xeon Platinum 28 Core Server
CPU: Xeon Platinum 28/56
RAM: 512GB
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SPi-TF
Chassis:
Kolink Levante Midi-Tower
Lian Li Lancool II Mesh
be quiet! Pure Base 500DX Black (The best case. Great airflow, easy cabling, and fits perfectly inside a rack)
Small Atom Server
CPU: Intel Atom Processor C3958. 16 cores, 16 threads (TDP support 31W)
Motherboard: A2SDV-16C-TLN5F
RAM: 128 GB DDR4-2400MHz
Chassis: Fractal Meshify C
My Networking Lab for CCNA to CCNIE
5x Cisco Catalyst 3560-C
4x Cisco Catalyst 2960-C
4x Cisco Catalyst 2960
3x Cisco 1800 Router
3x Cisco Catalyst 3750
1x Nortel Voip Phone
If you are looking for switches for your Cisco study lab, I would suggest something similar to what I have. They are fanless, small, cheap (10–40€), and don’t take much power. Perfect for studying CCNA and other Cisco certifications.
Many enterprise switches could take the same or even more power than the servers, and the fans are as noisy as engines. So, these are perfect for a study lab.
The downside is the ethernet ports are 10/100 MbE, which means I can’t use them for my VMware home lab because they are too slow. When I bought them, I was only thinking about my networking lab and Cisco certification. The newer version has 1 GbE or even 10GbE ports, but they are expensive.
Malware Forensic Lab
Dell Precision M4600 (RAM 32GB, Core i7-2820QM, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M)
- VMware Workstation Pro
- SysInternal Suite
- Encase
- Ida Pro
- FTK Imager
- Autopsy/the Sleuth Kit
- WireShark
- …
Plan to build a new digital forensic lab.