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Showing posts from April, 2020

How To Create a Home Lab with VirtualBox

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The days of needing a 4 post rack (or a solid table), a spare room in your house, and an increased electric bill for a home lab are long gone. Between virtualization and the cloud, there are more options than ever to create a great home lab for minimal cost. While I'm a fan of cloud resources, the free tiers on most cloud platforms can be limited or you have to be very careful what you enable so as not to get charged. It's for these reasons I'm going to stay away from the cloud for today -- I want this process to be completely free for anyone that wants a home lab. This leaves us with a few options for virtualization. The most popular are VirtualBox, VMware, and Hyper-V. Hyper-V will require a Windows operating system, and VMware Workstation has changed in availability over the years and is currently a paid product. This leaves VirtualBox -- completely free, has most of the features available in the paid VMware Workstation, and will work on Windows, macOS, or Linux