Several folks have asked me about my home lab server build since I’ve tweeted a time or two about it. Here’s what I’ve built so far, and some of the logic behind my choices.

The Purpose Of My Lab

I am working on network virtualization, automation, and software defined networking tools. I need to work with a variety of hypervisors, virtual switches & routers, and virtual networking appliances. While I’ll have a few applications I’m running along the way, applications themselves not my explicit interest. This is not a lab to do Microsoft Windows Server work, for example. Specific tools I plan to work with include F5 BIG-IP VE lab edition (which I’ve blogged about a little bit already), Brocade Vyatta vRouter, VMware ESXi, Cisco CSR1000V, Juniper Firefly, LiveAction, OpenDaylight, OpenStack, Open vSwitch, and whatever else comes to mind. If you’re a vendor and I didn’t mention some product you wish I had, feel free to contact me if you’d like me to consider evaluating your product.

In the physical realm, I’m hoping to do some work with Shortest Path Bridging using Avaya gear, and am hoping to do some pure OpenFlow hardware switching with Pica8 gear. We’ll see what shakes out. I need vendor support to pull some of this off, since I can’t actually buy switch hardware outright. My pockets are only so deep.

My Lab Switch

In a case of being in the right place at the right time, I inherited a pair of Cisco SG300-52 switches a couple of years ago. To be fair, I thought about they only thing they had going for them was 52 10/100/1000 ports. I assumed they were consumer grade switches that happened to be manageable. After digging into what these switches can actually do, they have turned out to be unexpected gems that are astonishingly useful as lab switches.