Summary: Executive Summary: It’s important to keep your skills sharp. Sometimes this means you want to do some work outside of the office. You may even have a home lab setup. But without breaking the bank, what are some ways that you can exercise those skills and learn some of the latest enterprise technology? We’ll share some experiences and suggest some options based on our personal experience. Hosts: John Kresic, Tom Kresic, Mike Kresic Running Time: 43:03 IT Pro News: Gmail turns 10, changing how the web works Microsoft open sourcing some important .Net technologies IBM celebrates 50 years of mainframes and backward compatibility Windows XP is at end-of-support after 13 years Windows 8.1 update makes the OS more desktop-friendly IT Pro Main Topic: Using A Home Lab to Keep Your Skills Sharp Getting started: decide how to separate your home “production” assets from your lab All virtual, a DMZ and some extra routers Virtualization. What do you want to test? Type 2 hypervisors run on top of an OS. This is like VMware Fusion or Parallels for Mac. VirtualBox from Oracle, VMware Workstation. Great for testing the next version of Windows Server, Windows Client, linux, etc. Type 1 hypervisor (Hyper-V, Citrix XEN Server or ESXi) is going to require some hardware. Check vendor compatibility lists to see what type of system board and components will work. Lots of helpful docs out there showing you sample “white box” servers. Many cost
