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This article mainly introduces how to build a home lab from hardware to firewall, which has certain reference value. Interested friends can refer to it. I hope you will gain a lot after reading this article. Let Xiaobian take you to understand it together.

When planning a home lab, there are three things to consider: hardware, software, and maintenance. We'll look at the first two here, and we'll talk about how to save time maintaining computer labs in a future article.

hardware

When considering hardware requirements, first consider how the lab will be used, as well as your budget, noise, space and power usage.

If buying new hardware is too expensive, search local colleges, ads, and sites like eBay or Craigslist for places to get used servers. They are usually cheap, and server-grade hardware lasts for years. You will need three types of hardware: virtualized servers, storage devices, and routers/firewalls.

virtualization server

A virtualized server allows you to run multiple virtual machines that share physical machine resources while maximizing resource utilization and isolation. If you break a virtual machine, you don't need to rebuild the entire server, just virtualize one. If you want to test or try something without damaging the entire system, you just need to create a new virtual machine to run it.

In virtual servers, the two most important factors to consider are the number of CPU cores and their speed, and memory capacity. If there are not enough resources to share with all virtual machines, they will be overallocated and try to acquire CPU cycles and memory from other virtual machines.

Therefore, consider a multi-core CPU platform. You want to make sure the CPU supports virtualization instructions (Intel's VT-x instruction set and AMD's AMD-V instruction set). Premium consumer processors capable of handling virtualization include Intel's i5 or i7 and AMD's Ryzen processors. If you're considering server-class hardware, Intel's Zhiqiang Series and AMD's EPYC are good choices. Memory can be expensive, especially with recent DDR4 memory. When we estimate how much memory is needed, allocate at least 2 GB of memory for the host operating system.

If you're worried about electricity bills or noise, solutions such as Intel NUC appliances can be small, consume less power, and make less noise, but at the expense of scalability.

NAS

If you want a computer with hard drives to store all your personal data, movies, pictures, etc., and provide storage for virtualized servers, you need network-attached storage (NAS).

In most cases, you are unlikely to need a powerful CPU. In fact, many commercial NAS solutions use low-power ARM CPUs. Motherboards that support multiple SATA drives are a must. If your motherboard does not have enough ports, add additional ports using a host bus adapter (HBA) SAS controller.

Network performance is critical to NAS, so it is best to choose gigabit networks (or faster).

Memory requirements vary depending on your file system. ZFS is one of the most popular file systems on NAS, and you need more memory to use features like caching or deduplication. Error-correcting code (ECC) memory is the best option to prevent data corruption (but make sure your motherboard supports it before buying). Last but not least, don't forget to use an uninterrupted power supply (UPS), as power outages can cause data errors.

firewalls and routers

Have you ever realized that cheap routers/firewalls are often the main part of protecting your home network from the outside world? These routers rarely, if ever, receive timely security updates. Are you scared now? Well, yes!

Generally, you don't need a powerful CPU or a lot of memory to build your own router/firewall, unless you need high throughput or perform CPU-intensive tasks such as virtual Private Cloud servers or traffic filtering. In this case, you will need a multicore CPU that supports AES-NI.

You may want at least 2 Gigabit or faster Ethernet network interface cards (NIC), which is not required, but I recommend using a management switch to connect your own assembled routers to create VLANs to further isolate and protect your network.

Home computer lab PfSense

software

After selecting your virtualization server, NAS, and firewall/router, the next step is to explore different operating systems and software to maximize their impact. Although you can use regular Linux distributions such as CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu, they usually take more time to configure and manage than the following.

virtualization software

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) allows you to turn Linux into a hypervisor so you can run multiple virtual machines on the same machine. Best of all, KVM as part of Linux is the first choice for many business and home users. If you prefer, you can install libvirt and virt-manager to manage your virtualization platform.

Proxmox VE is a powerful enterprise-class solution and a fully open source virtualization and container platform. It is based on Debian and uses KVM as its hypervisor and LXC as its container. Proxmox provides a powerful web interface, API, and scalability to many cluster nodes, which is useful because you never know when your lab will run out of capacity.

oVirt (RHV) is another enterprise-class solution that uses KVM as a hypervisor. Just because it's enterprise-grade doesn't mean you can't use it at home. oVirt provides a powerful web interface and API, and can handle hundreds of nodes (if you run that many servers, I don't want to be your neighbor!). The potential problem with oVirt for home labs is that it requires a minimal set of nodes: you'll need one external storage (e.g. NAS) and at least two other virtualized nodes (you can run on just one node, but you'll run into environmental maintenance issues).

Network attached storage software

FreeNAS is the most popular open source NAS distribution and is based on the stable FreeBSD operating system. One of its most powerful features is support for ZFS file systems, which provide data integrity checks, snapshots, replication, and multiple levels of redundancy (mirroring, striped mirroring, and striping). Most importantly, all functions are managed through a powerful and easy-to-use web interface. Before installing FreeNAS, check for hardware support, as it is not as widespread as Linux-based distributions.

Another popular alternative is Linux-based OpenMediaVault. One of its main features is modularity, with plug-ins that can be extended and added features. It includes features such as web-based management interfaces, protocols such as CIFS, SFTP, NFS, iSCSI, and volume management, including software RAID, resource quotas, access control lists (ACL), and share management. Because it is Linux-based, it has extensive hardware support.

Firewall/router software

pfSense is an open source enterprise router and firewall distribution based on FreeBSD. It can be installed directly on a server or even in a virtual machine (to manage virtual or physical networks and save space). It has many features that can be extended with software packages. Although it also has command-line access, it can be managed entirely using the web interface. It has all the features you would expect from a router and firewall, such as DHCP and DNS, as well as more advanced features such as intrusion detection (IDS) and intrusion prevention (IPS) systems. You can listen on multiple different interfaces or networks using VLANs and create secure servers with just a few mouse clicks. pfSense uses pf, a stateful packet filter developed for the OpenBSD operating system that uses IPFilter-like syntax. Many companies and organizations use pfSense.

Thank you for reading this article carefully. I hope the article "How to Build a Home Lab from Hardware to Firewall" shared by Xiaobian will be helpful to everyone. At the same time, I hope you will support it a lot. Pay attention to the industry information channel. More relevant knowledge is waiting for you to learn!

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