How to get started learning Infra with a Homelab
Here is my recommendation for quickly learning at least the basics of infrastructure: Hardware If you can start with a cluster of at least 3 computers. If not a single computer for a hypervisor will work If not then VirtualBox or VMWorkstation will get you started with the absolute basics until you can get a hypervisor If you have a couple old computers or laptops (at least 8gb ram each) then start with those. I recommend grabbing a few sff Dell or sff Lenovo or Intel nucs from eBay. If you can put a 1tb nvme in each one and as much RAM as possible. If you want to learn Phones get a cheap VOIP phone that will work with Asterisk (I will explain this later). If you are interested in Enterprise equipment pick up a few old Servers and a Server Rack (this WILL be expensive) Use Labgopher to find good deals on used servers https://www.labgopher.com/ If you want to focus on networking grab a used Firewall (Fortigate is one of the cheapest, Palo Alto is really fucking good, Sophos is pretty cheap, but I personally would avoid Cisco Firewalls) and a fancy Layer 3 Switch (Cisco, Juniper, Netgear, Ubiquiti are all popular brands) Also don’t forget to get a USB to rj45 serial cable for managing the switches and firewalls Connect them all to your Lab network and install your hypervisor of choice onto all of them. If you can get 4 computers I would make one of them a dedicated NAS with something like TrueNAS or Unraid. The benefit of a NAS is that you can store your VMs on it and because it is on the nas shared by all nodes in the cluster you can do things like instant migration between hypervisor nodes. I’m not sure how important that is to learn or play around with, but it is super cool to see VMs pop between nodes in an instant. It also allows you to use High Availability (HA). ...