After many different considerations and constant changes, the final form of my personal lab looks like the diagram below.
The main source of a computing power is my few-years-old Lenovo Laptop, that costed me around £400. It was quite cheap and it does feel and look cheap, but the good think is that it has an i5 processor (5th Gen), it came with an expandable 8GB of RAM and has a decent additional graphics card. A dedicated graphics card indirectly easy that extra load from the CPU. My plan was to saving up and upgrading from HDD to SSD and to 16GB of RAM.
Now the Laptop has 500GB SSD, i5 Processor, 16GB or RAM, which can fulfil the purposes of most of my lab requirements. So in my opinion the most important when you buy a lab laptop that has less than 8GB is to be RAM upgradeable to at least 16GB.
As you can see I have all my lab devices connected together using a Cisco Device. I think any Netgear unmanaged switch can serve the same purpose, that normally cost around £20. I am doing that to seperate my home network and my lab network. When you run packet capturing software (like Wireshark) you only want to analyse traffic from your test network. All my hosts run VirtualBox. On this example you can see only two hosts (the NUC and the Laptop) but this can scale up to additional hosts. Intel NUCs are mini powerful PCs that can be very useful for people that have limited space for lab. My VMs use a Bridged Network Adapter, so any VM on any host can communicate each other.
My physical hosts have also WiFi adapters, so they can connect to my Home Network. I am using that in order to be able to remotely connect to any of my host from anywhere. Another reason is that some lab machine may require access to the internet. Those VMs can have a bridged adapter connected to my host's WiFi adapter, so they can have direct internet access. Actually there is a better and scalable way to do that. I will analyse on a later post.
What I am trying to say, is that if you don't have the budget to get a great specs Lab PC, try to connect a couple mid-range ones and you should be good to go. Also there are different ways to get the most out of your computer that I will analyse in coming posts.
The main source of a computing power is my few-years-old Lenovo Laptop, that costed me around £400. It was quite cheap and it does feel and look cheap, but the good think is that it has an i5 processor (5th Gen), it came with an expandable 8GB of RAM and has a decent additional graphics card. A dedicated graphics card indirectly easy that extra load from the CPU. My plan was to saving up and upgrading from HDD to SSD and to 16GB of RAM.
Now the Laptop has 500GB SSD, i5 Processor, 16GB or RAM, which can fulfil the purposes of most of my lab requirements. So in my opinion the most important when you buy a lab laptop that has less than 8GB is to be RAM upgradeable to at least 16GB.
As you can see I have all my lab devices connected together using a Cisco Device. I think any Netgear unmanaged switch can serve the same purpose, that normally cost around £20. I am doing that to seperate my home network and my lab network. When you run packet capturing software (like Wireshark) you only want to analyse traffic from your test network. All my hosts run VirtualBox. On this example you can see only two hosts (the NUC and the Laptop) but this can scale up to additional hosts. Intel NUCs are mini powerful PCs that can be very useful for people that have limited space for lab. My VMs use a Bridged Network Adapter, so any VM on any host can communicate each other.
My physical hosts have also WiFi adapters, so they can connect to my Home Network. I am using that in order to be able to remotely connect to any of my host from anywhere. Another reason is that some lab machine may require access to the internet. Those VMs can have a bridged adapter connected to my host's WiFi adapter, so they can have direct internet access. Actually there is a better and scalable way to do that. I will analyse on a later post.
What I am trying to say, is that if you don't have the budget to get a great specs Lab PC, try to connect a couple mid-range ones and you should be good to go. Also there are different ways to get the most out of your computer that I will analyse in coming posts.
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