Tips for building a home lab to prep for network certifications

Hands-on experience with network hardware and software can solidify certification-test concepts or let you practice skills that may be part of a cert exam, and the process can be helped along by use of a home lab. But how do you go about building one?

Start by identifying your learning goals and figuring out the hardware and software they’ll require. If you’re focused on applications, server environments, automation, or identity management, a server for hosting virtual environments may suffice. But if you’re interested in networking at Layers 1, 2 and 3, you’ll need some physical networking hardware such as routers, switches, or hardware firewalls. This is especially true if you’re seeking vendor certification on specific devices.

If you need vendor-specific networking hardware, that can run into thousands of dollars, which may be prohibitive. If so, some vendors—for example Juniper with its vLabs! and Cisco with its Cisco Packet Tracer—provide cloud-based lab environments with at least some access for free.

If you are learning networking concepts, the simplest solution is leveraging the virtual networking capabilities of a hypervisor. But if you need more sophisticated networking features, there is a host of open-source network switches or firewall solutions that can be run as virtual appliances: Open vSwitch (OvS), pfSense, Vyos, and OPNsense to name just a few.

There are several good options for a hypervisor. Both Microsoft (Hyper-V Server 2019) and VMware (ESXI 8) offer bare-metal hypervisors for free, while Microsoft also offers Hyper-V as a Windows feature. Oracle can provide VirtualBox on top of several operating systems, and there are also open-source projects like bare-metal hypervisors ProxMox, KVM, and the Xen Project that have community backing.

The compute power you’ll need to support a virtual environment depends on the type of workloads you’re studying. For example, container-based apps, automation, and AI are compute heavy, but most can be readily virtualized on energy-efficient devices like mini-PCS or on secondhand server hardware. Inherent benefits when leveraging virtualization include increased density (multiple hosts/applications/runtimes on a single physical server), the ability to snapshot and easily roll back to test multiple variations, and the ability to leverage pre-built VMs or virtual appliances.

Remember that, depending on the hardware you choose, the power draw can put a strain on your home electrical system. A mini-PC has modest power demands, but previous-generation enterprise-class servers may draw enough power to require upgrades to your home electrical wiring.

If your requirements include virtual machines, databases, or anything else dependent on significant storage, you’ll want to have adequate storage capacity to ensure performance. This is especially true if at some point you’ll need to reset your virtual environment; VM snapshots can require significant storage.

Also consider whether your lab needs something other than physical storage. Many clusters require storage to be configured through fibre channel, iSCSI, or some other appropriate connection to a SAN. This can be done easily in a lab using a virtual appliance including FreeNAS, the free editions of StarWind vSAN, or StarWind SAN & NAS among others.

If you’re studying containers, remember that most hypervisors include container support out of the box, but carefully consider their management consoles because some provide a richer management experience than others.

There is a plethora of good management tools that could be useful in a home lab, and of course a lot depends on the ecosystems within your lab.

If you’re running Windows, particularly Windows VMs, you should use Windows Admin Center to manage your bare metal and VMs from one console. For container-based environments, consider Podman, whose management console is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux and includes both a container-based management engine and a desktop management console.

To take your lab to the next level, consider open-source automation tools to help optimize the environment. For example, these tools can automate an available Active Directory environment, DHCP, DNS, or an empty database using scripts or infrastructure-as-code resources. These tools are available via GitHub as well as other open-source communities.