Reply to: Building a home lab (IT Contractor) & what you got?

[Spoiler]

Got a link to what exactly is included currently software licence wise? Their website is vague and no obvious summary of content.

£350/year? No-brainer if using the Azure free credits, pays for itself.

This page links to this XLS with the benefits (the 'License table for Microsoft Action Pack Partners' link).

$100 Azure credit = £75 in Azure world.

Only thing on the Azure credits is it's a use or lose per month. They don't roll over.

[Hobosapien]

Currently signed up to Microsoft Action Pack, which in addition to Office 365 licenses, Windows licenses, etc... also includes £75 Azure credit a month...

Got a link to what exactly is included currently software licence wise? Their website is vague and no obvious summary of content.

£350/year? No-brainer if using the Azure free credits, pays for itself.

[Spoiler]

Currently signed up to Microsoft Action Pack, which in addition to Office 365 licenses, Windows licenses, etc... also includes £75 Azure credit a month.
Currently tinkering with MQTT on an Ubuntu server, hosted in Azure.
Looking to get started with AWS next ...

[vwdan]

Hi guys

Sorry for the delay in replying, its been a very busy week - I appreciate your replies!

VWDAN - You have a C7000 at home?????? where???? that is loud! I hope you have a basement or a very well insulated garage do you leave that thing on 24/7???

It's in the garage and HELL NO. Fortunately the garage is an "add on", so the wall it's sat next to is a proper external wall - weirdly you can hear it from the end of the drive, but not all even stood next to the wall. And no, it consumes an impressive amount of electricity (Think it's about £2 a day or so) so I've got a fully scripted power on and off sequence.

How are you guys finding it in the contract world, is the ratio more towards companies adopting the cloud 100% or are you still finding plenty that have hybrid or have not migrated?

There still seems to be a misconception that the "cloud" cannot match bare metal performance for certain services - I'm not so sure that's true anymore.

Can only talk for my niche field. Basically, I find a lot of talk about the cloud but eventually the realities of cost bite. I work in a field that needs full windows machines (as opposed to abstract services) and it just gets so expensive quickly. Lots of companies have a "bit" of cloud, though - I definitely expect that to increase, but I think most organisations with serious infrastructure will be hybrid for many years to come.

I agree about performance, but again, you pay for that privilege. For example, SSD's are essentially a must in Azure for anything that needs any real IO.

[1000101011]

I think there is a saying, that there are those that want to USE the cloud and those that want to BUILD the cloud (not give up on the baremetal tech) - I am probably in both camps.

In my previous (perm) job I didn't touch any bare metal for probably about 2 years!!!!

How are you guys finding it in the contract world, is the ratio more towards companies adopting the cloud 100% or are you still finding plenty that have hybrid or have not migrated?

There still seems to be a misconception that the "cloud" cannot match bare metal performance for certain services - I'm not so sure that's true anymore.

BTW: I bought a very power hungry (400w idle) quad socket R810 with 128GB RAM, yes overkill but its good to have something at home again that I can completely control, but I will ofc still use AWS (I have to) but on a smaller scale again.

[darmstadt]

emulation isn't the same as running the systems. but, hey, - fill yer boots

I also have access to a Z with only 1 other user so...I actually did a migration in Florida recently and timing showed the emulation to actually be faster than their current Z in certain areas. It depends on what you use it for and I know a lot of large companies that use it for development. Then again, how many people want a Z in their home office?

[BR14]

Hmm, I'm running a parallel sysplex (z/VM 6.4 and 2 * z/OS 2.3 and occasionally z/VSE 6.1), another system running various z/OS'es from 2.1 upwards, 2 laptops running z/OS 2.3 and Z7VM 6.4 and 6.4 and another laptop running z/OS 2.3 in a VM and z/VM 7.1. All at home...

emulation isn't the same as running the systems. but, hey, - fill yer boots

[1000101011]

Hi guys

Sorry for the delay in replying, its been a very busy week - I appreciate your replies!

VWDAN - You have a C7000 at home?????? where???? that is loud! I hope you have a basement or a very well insulated garage do you leave that thing on 24/7???

Hobosapien - You know being pretty much fully immersed in AWS I did not know Azure had a DK that would effectively give you Azure in a box, that's pretty cool but as you say its also expensive - I read the blog linked up and he had 50GB or so of RAM left after all of that to play with, its not much is it considering the outlay and effort!

Rest of you guys who mentioned AWS, I was using AWS for a small K8S cluster / lambda / s3 / AWS Config / Inspector (cis benchmarking) etc and literally only running it maybe an hour a day, it was still getting expensive to the point where I may as well get myself some home tin again to at least replace the EC2 element that I want to keep switched on.

When I was perm I got rid of all of my lab kit (I had a lot) as I wanted to focus purely on cloud but now I am contract I see that its really swings and roundabouts, you don't know when you might be involved in something that needs bare metal (like VMware for example) though obviously like everyone else I prefer the pure cloud roles.

Are any of you running K8s clusters???

[Scruff]

3 x HP Microservers
48 Port Smart Managed Switch
14TB vSAN

Would I do it again....? Nah, I'd just run in AWS.

[darmstadt]

entry level Zseries - 750k
home lab? naaah

Hmm, I'm running a parallel sysplex (z/VM 6.4 and 2 * z/OS 2.3 and occasionally z/VSE 6.1), another system running various z/OS'es from 2.1 upwards, 2 laptops running z/OS 2.3 and Z7VM 6.4 and 6.4 and another laptop running z/OS 2.3 in a VM and z/VM 7.1. All at home...

[vetran]

entry level Zseries - 750k
home lab? naaah

speed of our Z series you could run it on raspberry pi.

More deep frozen than deep thought!

[BR14]

entry level Zseries - 750k
home lab? naaah

[MrButton]

I personally just use AWS. Pay using my company debit card and they now provide VAT receipts downloadable in the billing section.


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[fool]

I toyed briefly with setting up my own Azure Stack based on their free development kit but the minimum hardware requirements put me off:

CPU: 12 physical cores
RAM: 96 GB

Saw the following where someone set one up for $6k:

Running Microsoft Azure Stack Developer Kit at home

May as well just PAYG and use Azure itself. The monthly cost will probably be similar to the electrical cost of running your own server at home anyway.

I bought some kit from here:

Refurbished Servers, PCs, Workstations & Parts | Bargain Hardware

It'd be more worried about the power bill, but you could always colo them.

[Hobosapien]

I toyed briefly with setting up my own Azure Stack based on their free development kit but the minimum hardware requirements put me off:

CPU: 12 physical cores
RAM: 96 GB

Saw the following where someone set one up for $6k:

Running Microsoft Azure Stack Developer Kit at home

May as well just PAYG and use Azure itself. The monthly cost will probably be similar to the electrical cost of running your own server at home anyway.