New endpoint administrators and those interested into getting there hands dirty often ask about home lab setups. Some feel the need to use what the ‘MVPs’ use; VMWare, NUCs, Hyper-V, etc. My opinion… use what you have, but remember the more equipment you use that is similar to your work environment, the more knowledge you’ll walk away with.
My lab set up is an old Lenovo ThinkServer TS140. I’ve had this thing for almost 10 years now. It has an old E3-1245v3 processor, 32GB of RAM, and a couple TB SSDs.
Most of my previous workloads have moved to a NAS over the years since docker has gotten nice, so now its primarily a lab server.
My hypervisor of choice is ProxMox VE. I’m a Linux guy and have been so since the late 2000’s. I officially stopped dual booting in the early 2010’s and stopped distro hopping around 2013. Fedora (Gnome) is where I landed if interested. The only non-Linux machines I use are the lab VMs and an iPad for reading. I consider my Pixel phone Linux :-).
