Building a Home IT Lab

The primary purpose of FreeNAS is:

To act as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server

If your lab systems or VMs need to be configured automatically, in a pre-defined way, which of these kinds of software tools should you consider using?

configuration management software like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible

A virtual lab, one composed of virtual machines, is optimal for:

flexible configuration without a high hardware cost

A native or bare metal lab, one where each computer runs one operating system, is optimal for:

high-performance tasks

ESXi

is a Type-1 Hypervisor

Proxmox Virtual Environment:

is a Type-1 Hypervisor

Hyper-V:

is a Type-2 Hypervisor

VirtualBox

is a Type-2 Hypervisor

KVM:

is the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine

Generally speaking, a home lab should be _____ the home network

isolated from

Containers are a good choice if your lab needs:

many small services running in isolated spaces, or the ability to quickly create templated clients

When you start building your lab, the first thing you should do is:

plan out the roles that systems in your lab will fulfill, then determine what computing resources they'll need.

Qemu:

provides emulation of various processor architectures and hardware

In a lab, services _____

should be deployed and hosted in a way that makes sense for your goals and hardware

LXC Containers:

use the host's kernel but can run their own Linux distro

VirtualBox supports nested virtualization on:

AMD processors, but not Intel processors

If you plan to run ESXi in your lab, it's usually best to run it:

As the boot OS on a host

To enable Hyper-V on a Windows host:

Enable the Hyper-V role in "Turn Windows Features On or Off" dialog

While it's often more costly, this kind of storage media results in faster disk operations:

SSD or Solid State Disk

VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion:

can be used for a limited time before a license is required