In this post, we will be talking about home labs. What is a home lab? As the name implies, it is a lab that you maintain at home. Why would you want a home lab? A home lab provides a safe environment to develop technical skills, learn new tools and technologies, and develop and test concepts or solutions you may want to implement in production later. Unlike a production environment, though, you don’t have to worry if you mess something up. A home lab can be as simple or as complex as you want or need. It is important to consider that there will be costs involved.

My Lab

To keep costs down, I will be installing Oracle VirtualBox on my laptop. I already own the laptop, so there is no additional cost to use it. VirtualBox is also available for free. The laptop has an 8-core CPU, 32GB RAM, and a 1TB NVMe drive so it can run several VMs concurrently. I’ll be using the lab to refresh and improve my Linux skills and to study for certifications such as the RHCSA.

VirtualBox

Oracle VirtualBox is available free of charge. It is cross-platform meaning it can be installed on *Nix, Windows, or Mac and can host *Nix or Windows guest VMs. The VMs can then be moved to other devices later if needed. It is a type 2 hypervisor so it is easy to install and use.

More information about VirtualBox can be found in the documentation: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/