October 13, 2016 at 10:08 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The 2016 Home Lab
October 14, 2016 at 2:17 am
Hmm, I'm not trying to just cruise and I don't feel I need a home lab, though my home setup is decent. Mind you I have got access to work AWS dev circuits from home and can play with those, but I'll tend to do more background research when at home.
October 14, 2016 at 3:01 am
At the risk of outing myself as a pale imitation of a database professional, I work to live, not the other way around.
Apart from being on call (which now I've got the DB environment into a stable and productive state is thankfully a rare event) once I leave work I can concentrate on my life - my wife, my kids, my dogs, my interests and, not to be underestimated, relaxing and chilling in front of the telly!
With working and commuting it's straight to work as soon as I get up in the morning, and get home around 7pm. There's precious little time for the essential chores and the things that really matter, the last thing I want to do is use that time doing more work!
October 14, 2016 at 3:05 am
I also don't feel I want a home lab, possibly because I'm lucky enough to be able to try most new stuff out at work.
October 14, 2016 at 4:05 am
Interesting post but I'm not sure I'd need to have a full 'Home Lab' to be able to progress. I do have access to a reasonable laptop with all the software I use but I like to spend my time outside work with my family. There are times when I do use 'tech' at home but this would be low cost computing devices which I consider help me better understand many techniques which are then transferable to my 'day' job.
October 14, 2016 at 6:10 am
I had home labs at the beginning of my career, and now I don't have anything. If I *want* try something out, I'll spin up a virtual on my laptop and delete it when done. As time goes, I spend less and less time in front of a computer at home.
October 14, 2016 at 6:14 am
Obviously the solution that will work best, is the solution that works for each individual. Could be that you only need a decent powered laptop with a big drive and the Pro version of Windows 7/8/10, which would get you Hyper-V services (virtual machines) to stand up test beds.
Or take an older desktop PC with a decent processor and RAM, toss Hyper-V Server (free!) on it, add the manager to your desktop so you can actually create VMs on it, and go.
Or, prowl Craigslist for older servers (might need to buy hard drives for it) and do the same.
As for me, my current home lab is something of a beast.
I've got one Core2 Quad-powered physical box running Active Directory services
One Xeon-powered Hyper-V server with 2x VMs running AD / DNS / DHCP and the management server for my networking gear
One Xeon-powered Hyper-V server (Used PowerEdge r900, 4x Xeons, 64GB RAM) that I stand up my lab machines on
One NAS host running FreeNAS, which was going to be used to cluster the two Hyper-V boxes
All of the above is in a 44U rack.
With the exception of the rack and the PowerEdge, everything was put together as I went along, sometimes from retired PCs as I upgraded my desktop. I think I paid ~$100 for the rack, and ~$200 for the PowerEdge (plus another $100 for the rack rails and drive caddies, the drives were retired laptop drives.)
So, is my home lab a bit of overkill? Yeah, I'd probably take the "...a bit of..." and the question mark out of that sentence. But, it works for me, it gives me someplace to putter and keep my skills outside SQL sharp (I can still manage a DNS, DHCP, and AD!)
October 14, 2016 at 6:33 am
I've got a bit of a home lab but rarely use it these days. Frankly commute time plus an average of 9-10 hour days on top leaves little for the family stuff as it is.
When the kids were younger and I was tied down I used to spend a lot more time training myself and writing.
I've reached the age where I resent unpaid work. Why am I working my guts out for someone else to get rich and probably not say thank you for any work done gratis. Render unto Caesar and all that.
Time spent away from technology is valuable and there is not much of it
October 14, 2016 at 6:58 am
I've paid for an MSDN subscription for several years. Microsoft has revamped their subscriptions, now called Visual Studio subscriptions and also made it more expensive to buy for the features that I use. It looks like the Visual Studio Enterprise is what I need to renew next year.
October 14, 2016 at 7:04 am
I just build what I want in Azure, fire it up when I need it and shut it down when I don't. Keeps costs way down. Much cheaper than building a similar lab from boxes and wires!
October 14, 2016 at 8:27 am
I used to build VMs on my laptop but finally broke down and bought a small dell server a couple of weeks ago. It has a 3.4 xeon skylake proc, 32 gb ram and a 500 gb spinning drive. Got it for 624.00 during one of their sales. Even with the spinning drive it is amazingly fast. The biggest problem is not trying to spend more money on it. I might by a SSD for it.
October 14, 2016 at 8:43 am
I spin up VMs on my gaming machine when I want to do home lab stuff -
32 GB Ram, i7 4790k, 512 GB SSD, 5 TB spinning Rust. I have a 9 TB NAS for stuff that is in storage/ backups/running large downloads, and a Thinkpad W520 with 12 GB RAM that I can copy Vms to if I need them on the go.
October 14, 2016 at 8:44 am
dave.farmer (10/14/2016)
At the risk of outing myself as a pale imitation of a database professional, I work to live, not the other way around.Apart from being on call (which now I've got the DB environment into a stable and productive state is thankfully a rare event) once I leave work I can concentrate on my life - my wife, my kids, my dogs, my interests and, not to be underestimated, relaxing and chilling in front of the telly!
With working and commuting it's straight to work as soon as I get up in the morning, and get home around 7pm. There's precious little time for the essential chores and the things that really matter, the last thing I want to do is use that time doing more work!
+1000 to this and call.copse post
Life is to short, spend time with family and friends.
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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
October 14, 2016 at 8:57 am
I am all for working to live and spending time with family and friends.
I also believe you need to work on your career, which might be time away from work. You need to find some balance, and that will vary across time. I wouldn't expect someone with young children to spend much time away from them to work on their career.
However, before children, maybe after, maybe just a little while they're busy elsewhere, many professions work on their careers outside of their jobs. Engineers, doctors, lawyers, CPAs, many professionals need continuing education.
Balance is critical. Time with family, friends, and yourself, is very, very important.
October 14, 2016 at 9:13 am
For the AWS/Azure people with labs, anyone want to write an article that would allow someone to duplicate your lab?
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