As part of my motivation to do more, I’ve started on my new home-lab. As mentioned on a previous post, this is all running off of an inexpensive Dell desktop! You really don’t need much hardware to start with, just enough to run 2-3 vms (or even just one!). It kind of depends on how you want to continually use your lab:
- If you’d like to use your new computer for tasks other than running VMs (maybe that’s your only desktop?), then windows 10 is perfectly adequate! It’s more convenient to run windows 10 pro, since it has greater hardware support and remote desktop, but home edition is ok too.
- You could have a dedicated VM server instead. In this case, you’d want to go with the free edition of ESXi (link — I think it’s called vSphere Hypervisor edition now?). ESXi uses far less resources than windows 10, so that leaves you more room for the actual guests.
For now, I’m only using windows 10 home. For my VMs, I went with VirtualBox (Link). It’s free, very easy to use and performs great. I could’ve gone with Hyper-V, but that’s not available on Window 10 home.
I have this obsession with running windows 3.1 as a VM. The nostalgia is strong.
Downloading the required server software is easy!
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For Linux, I went with Ubuntu Server (link). I’m an OpenSuse guy at heart, but it seems to me that Ubuntu is taking preferential treatment at Microsoft, so I went with that.
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For Windows Server, I went with the 180 day free trial of Server 2016 (Link). I believe every DBA should have some degree of understanding of how the operating system is setup, how to maintain it, etc.
Looking back at Windows NT4/RedHat 7 days (ubuntu was still called Slackware back then), it’s amazing how easy it’s become to install a server anymore. Both Ubuntu and Windows Server only require you to select a handful of options, so you’re up and running in no time. Setting up an entire infrastructure (AD/DNS/DHCP) takes considerable more work, but for a basic server, it doesn’t get much easier than that (well, it can, thanks to containers, but that’s a different post).
For my next trick, we’ll download and install Windows Server 2019 (since it’s finally available again). Stay tuned!