I’m pretty much new to all things homelab as I’ve only started looking into it because of my job. I’m relatively new to my position (first job I got after getting my degree), so I wanted to learn more about virtualization and other related tools that could help me.
I want to practice using VMs and such. VMware vCenter, ESXi, PowershellCLI, Microsoft Windows Servers, RHEL, and others. And while my work does provide me a remote production environment for these, it’s not always available to me. A lot of other people work on them and I can’t really just go in and start messing around.
So I’ve been looking into getting a homelab setup for myself. I’m just not really sure what I should be going for, though. Do I get a Dell Poweredge Rxx0? I do have a PC of my own that I’ve been using with Hyper-V and VMware Workstation to create VMs of what I mentioned, but I dunno if I should just get a dedicated server or not? Should I just upgrade my RAM and add in some SSDs on my PC and would that work fine for me?
Oh, I was just trying to copy what they have at my workplace, since it would be better if I was familiar with it. And it did work out great since I was able to fix a bug and complete a task that they had for a while thanks to setting up a VM of Windows Server DC and fiddling around with it and RHEL.
Is hosting on a Windows machine not ideal? Don’t really have much experience with other OS to make a good assessment.
Well, if your goal is to upskill for the specific system your company runs, no other choice really.
But otherwise Windows is extreme fringe in the server world and basically all software is written for Linux or *BSD. Of course with WSL or VMs you can somehow make it work, but it is overly complex, insecure and lacks the flexibility a Linux native system has.
I’d say this, companies deploying new windows server installs aren’t long for this world.
Even banks and insurance companies are pushing to containerization, Linux, and the cloud.