Home Lab Introduction


This will be the first part of an important blog series about setting up your home lab.


A home lab is important because as an IT student or professional it will allow you to learn about virtualization, learn about different operating systems and allow you to do testing in a safe environment. 

You won’t have to worry about your school or your boss yelling at you for breaking things.

 Another added benefit of virutalization are snapshots. Imagine being able to save your state and if you make a mistake or break something being able to almost instantly revert back to the snapshot you took from before you made any changes. It's so good it almost feels like cheating!

Some Layer 1 Hypervisors (a Hypervisor is an OS that runs on the bare metal meant specifically for running VMs) are VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, and Xen.


In these tutorials I will be showing you how to set up your home lab using a Layer 2 Hypervisor (An application that runs on top of your host desktop OS such as Windows 10, Mac OS, Linux etc.). 

 There are a few different Layer 2 hypervisors for example VMWare Workstation, VMWare Fusion, Parallels, and VirtualBox. While each has their strength and weaknesses they are all pretty similar. 

In this series I will be using Oracle’s Virtual Box.

I recommend using at least a core i5 processor with at least 8GB of RAM but preferably a core i7 with 16GB of RAM as VMs are CPU and RAM intensive.

So follow me to the next blog where I will be showing you how to install VirtualBox!

 https://eyeteahero.blogspot.com/2019/04/installing-virtual-box-in-mac-os.html



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