Emc2Net HomeLab - Intro

After years of working within IT and having a very simple infrastructure at home, I decided to invest in some equipment in 2020 so I could have a proper infrastructure and my own HomeLab.

What triggered this decision was probably de COVID pandemic, the extra free time I had to expend at home and the months my family and I had to spent working/studing from home.

I had some requirements when I started planning for this:

• All the equipment installed in a rack.
• A network infrastructure that could be able to cope with the bandwidth, speed and stability requirements needed by several workplaces, with multiple video conferences, VPNs, online school solutions, PCs, mobile phones, etc running concurrently, and from anywhere on the 3 floors of my house.

• A server where I could run multiple virtual machines for my home services and testing.
• More control of what was happening in my network, be able to segment the network into different VLANs and have a proper router/firewall to control the internal traffic and the traffic from/to Internet.
• Access to my home infrastructure from Internet in a secured and controlled way.
• As low power consumption as possible.
• As low noise level as possible.
• Advance functionality without spending more money than necessary in all this.

After several weeks reading, thinking and planning, I started building and realizing this project and in these pages you have information about the process, the components, why they were chosen and how they are used.