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Building up a home lab has drastically helped my career in cybersecurity, and is one of the best decisions I have made. Currently I work as a penetration tester and make use of my lab setup almost every single day. Having a home lab has allowed me to constantly learn new techniques and not be reliant on somebody else building an environment to test on. This home lab has enabled me to greatly improve my skills, most notably in automation and working with Active Directory. I will not be posting reviews of everything, but more of compiling a list of it all for people who are curious .
This lab started out as a very small project. Originally all I had was a single desktop machine that I could run a couple of small virtual machines on. From there, I came to understand how much this lab could help my career… and now my office resembles a small data center. I will be releasing a video tour of my home lab setup soon on my YouTube channel.
Server
My server is the absolute core of my home lab. This is the very first piece of major hardware that I purchased and it is by far the most utilized piece. I run ESXi on it as a hypervisor and it allows me to spin up all sorts of virtual…
