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

[1000101011]

Hi all

This forum (ContractorUK) is an excellent resource, good to be here.

Can I ask a very quick, straight to the point question:

I am an IT Contractor (started this year) and I want to build a home lab for the benefit of my business and career (certs, testing, development) - this is for legitimate business use as currently I am using AWS EC2 instances which I can't leave on as long as I would like, my questions are:

1. I know that I can buy the kit (enterprise class servers / storage and maybe some switches) from eBay and I want to claim it back as a business expense, how do you pay for it? Can I create my business as a delivery address and then just use that when I pay for it (personally) or do you add the LtdCo credit card AND the business address and do it that way? (paying for it direct out of the business account).

2. AWS - Again legitimate business use: development, testing, AWS certs - does anyone charge this back to the company, if so how do you do this? I have 3 x upcoming AWS certs that need renewing next year and ofc a multitude of new services AWS release that benefit me greatly to have an idea of use case for them.

3. Finally, those of you with home labs (for business use as I have outlined) what you got?

I used to have a fairly decent lab, a DL360P G8 with 2 x 8 Core Xeons and 292GB RAM + 8xSSDs but sold it when I thought I would be sitting in the AWS / cloud boat for the next 10 years (that was when I was permie!!!!).

Thanks

[portseven]

to the first 2 points, as long as you have a decent business justification for it, and you are not using them as quake servers or whatever the kids do nowadays its all good

as to what kit, the cloud sounds great but can get expensive if you forget to switch things off, i built a 10 node hadoop cluster last year and forgot to switch it off, until i saw my aws bill next month!

i think a well specced home computer, decent cpu, as much ram as you can fit in and plenty of disk space. maybe even a fully loaded iMac would be good, with a copy of vagrant, then it can double as a desktop too.

[vwdan]

Ah, I love me a good home lab. I've recently gone through a bit if an upgrade cycle for mine - got UniFi Gateway and a UniFi Switch to cover core networking.

Main lab is a HP C7000 chassis with 4x bl460c G7's. Flex 10 cards provide some silly amount of bandwidth internally (I wanna ay like 40gb) and 20gb up to my shared storage. Storage is a DL380 G7 pretending to be an iSCSI SAN with a mix of 15k SAS, SSD and a Fusion IO card.

Anyhow, yes, all purchased by the company. I tend to not overthink whose name it's in - MyCo has it's own debit cards and PayPal accounts, so I just use my personal eBay account but those payment methods. Request VAT invoices is a faff but easy.

I'm trying to do more cloud stuff but holy hell is IaaS expensive. I have a Site to Site VPN to Azure and even that costs me like 30 quid a month.

[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.

[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.

[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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[BR14]

entry level Zseries - 750k
home lab? naaah

[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!

[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...

[Scruff]

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

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