Building my homelab

I’ve been meaning to write up about my homelab. Even though my job provides access to test labs, there is nothing better to design and build it with your hands. I wanted to play with ELK stack, Splunk ES deployment, to test Windows Lab, Security Onion, Zeek and to play around with new distros like Clear Linux from Intel, NixOS.

I have started with demoting my trusty NUC6i7KYK 16GB RAM/512GB SSD to be an ESXi host. And recently I’ve complemented it with 2 x Xeon E5-2658v3 32GB RAM/512 GB SSD.

Energy wise the lab consumes around 200-450 Whr, depending on workload.

Currently I’m using my home Wi-Fi router as switch and firewall. I want to add dedicated switch and firewall(maybe use pfSense/opnSense instead). Also there is a need for better network segmentation. Another thing I’ve forgot, is to add NICs to my new 2 hosts, as those are build on consumer level motherboards.