What's your home & work lab like?

Asif Dasl

Home:

3 machines & 2 monitors (23" with KVM and a 17")
2 x Atom D510's with 4Gb RAM each and 2 x 500 Gb hard drives
1 x Atom 330 with 2Gb RAM and 1 x 500 Gb hard drive

I'm probably going to get a matching 23" and keep the general purpose 330 Atom then upgrade the D510's to quad-cores as they haven't worked out like I though they would. I though I would setup cheaper PCs instead of more expensive & more powerful VM machines. Looks like I'll have to go the more expensive route as my home lab feels a bit underpowered.

I've excluded 3 x 2950s, an 1130AG access point, and a bunch of 2610's for my CCNA studies which I haven't really started yet.


Work:

1 machine & 2 monitors (both 19")
1 x Dual Core with 4Gb RAM & 3 x 300 Gb hard drives

This will probably get upgraded in the next few weeks also as I have requested a new machine, probably going to go quad-core with 8Gb RAM.


I'd be interested to see what everyone else's setup looks like - PCs and/or Cisco gear.

earweed

Mine is pretty simple. I have a PC I built recently corei5, 12 GB Ram, 4 HDD's
I remote to this from the old comp I'm on now Pentium D 2GB RAM 2 HDD and 2 17" monitors.
There are a few threads here somewhere that you can post a picture of your home lab set-up.

Edit: On the lab comp I've got Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V installed running 4 Server 2008 guests (3 regular 1 server core)and 2 windows 7 guests

Mojo_666

Home LAB

Dell PowerEdge 2950
2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5430 @ 2.66Ghz
18GB Ram
5 x 300GB Hard Disks
6 x 1Gig NIC's
DRAC5

ESXi 4 Host with the Following Guests
4 x Windows Server 2008R2
4 x Windows Server 2008
2 x Windows 7 Enterprise Clients
SBS 2008

Cisco 877w Router
Cisco 2621XM Router
Cisco 1700 Router
Cisco Catalyst 2900XL Switch
Cisco Catalyst 2950 Switch
Cisco Aironet AIR-LAP1242G Access Point
HP Procurve 1400-24G Switch
HP Procurve 1400-8G Switch
NOKIA IP350 Firewall

erpadmin

It hasn't arrived yet, but I decided it was cheaper for me to go with the setup in this thread than build machines from the ground up, I go into detail in this thread below:

http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/57592-my-own-home-lab.html

I'm starting with 8GB, off the bat on one physical ML110 G6 machine (the G5s allowed for 8GB as the maximum amount of memory...my G6 will allow for 16GB which will happen next month, as well as 2 additional 250GB so that my VMs can have better performance. The physical server cost me $755 but that doesn't include the monitor, 20" Acer which so far looks good on my laptop. I went with an i3-530, as it's suitable for my needs.

tiersten

DS4300
ESX cluster
Bunch of 2600XMs, 2950s and AP1242s
Cat 3550
ASA5510
PIX506e
2511
Useless 1720

ASA5505 + 1841 that I actually use for my internet connection

My work "lab" at the moment is a 570 pSeries.

ajmatson

This is what I am running in my home lab. I am thinking of converting my servers to ATOM processors to save on electricity. At full load my lab uses about $100 a month on my electricity bill

Main System (Also running GNS3):
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T, ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3, 4GB G.Skill Flare DDR3-2000MHz, 1x OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD, 1x Seagate 750GB 7200.11

Server 1:
AMD Phenom II X4 910e, ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3, 8GB Mushkin Blackline DDR3-1600MHz, 3x Seagate 750GB RAID-5, 2x Neatgear Gbps NIC's, Norco RPC-4020 4U chassis.

Server 2:
AMD Athlon II X4 640, ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3, 4GB OCZ Spec Ops DDR3-1600, 2x Seagate 500GB Momentus XT RAID-1, 1x Intel Gbps NIC, In Win IN-R300 3U chassis.

Cisco Lab:
1x 1841 ISR, 2x 2610XM routers, 2x 2950 switches, 1x 2924 switch.

vCole

Home Lab:
Intel Quad2Core Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
8GB of DDR2 @ 800 Mhz
1 x 400GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
1 x 1TB (dual platter) 7200RPM SATA HDD
ESXi 4.1.0

tpatt100

I really should invest some money into a home lab again. Now that I will be working from home I have more time to get back into learning Linux again.

it_consultant

Mojo_666 wrote: »

Home LAB

Dell PowerEdge 2950
2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5430 @ 2.66Ghz
18GB Ram
5 x 300GB Hard Disks
6 x 1Gig NIC's
DRAC5

ESXi 4 Host with the Following Guests
4 x Windows Server 2008R2
4 x Windows Server 2008
2 x Windows 7 Enterprise Clients
SBS 2008

Cisco 877w Router
Cisco 2621XM Router
Cisco 1700 Router
Cisco Catalyst 2900XL Switch
Cisco Catalyst 2950 Switch
Cisco Aironet AIR-LAP1242G Access Point
HP Procurve 1400-24G Switch
HP Procurve 1400-8G Switch
NOKIA IP350 Firewall

You've got a hell of a lab! I have a big desktop running Virtual Box and an 1841 Cisco router.

How did you get your hands on a 2950 with all that hardware - its not as if those are sitting at best buy on special!

shodown

Home lab

3 3725
3 2651xm
2 1760's
3 2610's one of them is a frame switch
4 3550
Few IP phones
One HP server with CUCM 7 Unity Connection, UCCX,

Work lab
We have a warehouse of 2811's and 3825's and several 3560's and 2960's I'm sure we could make a CCIE level lab we just never gotten around to it.

pespi_man

In the shed (I mean lab)
Full server rack - 42 RU DELL
2 x HP DL360 g4 - 6 gig in each running esx4
1 x ML370 g3 -Openfiler with a HP storage array 6x146gig and 8x72gig
1 x old HP desktop for the jumphost
Some crap HP Procure switch and a cisco switch.. need a GB switch badly.

just enough for working on vmware exams and M$... wish i had the quad core's like Mojo_666 so i can play with exchange 2010.

Mojo_666

it_consultant wrote: »

You've got a hell of a lab! I have a big desktop running Virtual Box and an 1841 Cisco router.

How did you get your hands on a 2950 with all that hardware - its not as if those are sitting at best buy on special!

A company I was working for was being purchased by an HP house and all the Dell Kit was being replaced regardless of its age/condition/warranty status, we had a few items that had been de-commissioned for a while and was just taking up space. I asked the manager if I could have some kit for my LAB (as it was literally going to go in the skip) and he said yes. I ended up with a 2950 and a 2850, the 2850 was sold after I completed my MCSE 2003 to pay for some upgrades to the 2950.

Right place right time, with the cheeck to ask.

it_consultant

You made off like a bandit! We are an HP shop as well - not sure if thats a good thing.

msteinhilber

I ditched a whole lot of equipment once I sold my house and reverted back to apartment living, simply didn't have the space and realistically I really didn't need all of the hardware anyways.

As it stands now, I'm focused more on the security side along with Linux and BSD with a little bit of work with Juniper for my studies. I've gotten rid of just about all of my Cisco gear with the exception of some 3550's and 2950's I haven't yet put on ebay.

The home workstation/lab is as follows currently.

Primary workstation:
Intel core i7 920
12gb RAM
OS Drive - 4x OCZ Vertex Turbo 30gb RAID 0 on Areca ARC-1220
VM Drive - 4x Seagate 7200.12 500GB RAID 0+1
Storage - 2x WD RE3 1TB
Backup - 4x Seagate 7200.12 500GB RAID 0+1
2x Onboard NIC's for VM labs
1x Intel PRO/1000 PT Desktop Adapter (1x PCI-E, surprising how much of a difference these can make if you do any online gaming over onboard nic's).

2nd VM box:
Intel BOXDG45FC (their Mini-ITX LGA775 board)
Core2Quad Q8400S
4GB RAM
4x 250GB 2.5" Seagate drives in a 4-in-1 5.25 drive bay
Mini-ITX Desktop Case

I like this setup a lot better than what I had before because it's on a much smaller scale and I have physical access to everything right at my desk instead of having some housed in another room of the house like I had before. I have my primary desktop hooked to 3 24" LCD's, and 1 24" LCD hooked to a 4 port IOGEAR DVI KVM for the 2nd VM box as well as my a dock for my HP Elitebook or Macbook if needed, or for side work if I have any jobs going on. This time around I invested in a couple of DoubleSight dual display stands and haven't been happier. I can position my displays precisely as I want and easily reconfigure the layout if needed. Generally I have three of the displays in your typical landscape layout and one of the displays hooked to my main desktop in portrait for when I'm reading PDF's of other lengthy documents and don't care to scroll as often. I spent a lot of time switching around the physical layout as well as finding the right software to get everything to work exactly how I wanted and I have to say my productivity has gone up significantly - it's really a burden when I have to go into the office and work on my dual display desktop, I get a lot less done.

My networking gear consists solely of two Juniper SRX100's, one for my home network and one for testing/training, and a couple 802.11n AP's for my home network and one for any machines I bring home from side jobs to repair.

This was taken before I sold the house, it's setup a bit different now but pretty similar. Anybody with a lot of screens who doesn't have display stands should seriously consider them IMO.

Paul Boz

I don't have a formal lab any more. If I need to test something I just boot some ISOs into VMWare and do what I need to do.