Home Lab Setup

Company: Technical Consultant

The main component of my home lab is a Windows 10 PC running Hyper-V so that I can host various VMs. There are 3 VMs that I have regular use of:

  • 1 Windows Server 2019 - Here I setup Active Directory, DHCP, and DNS services to run my lab domain. This is unlicensed, so I will rebuild it every 6 months
  • 1 Windows 10 PC - This is my typical client to connect to the domain. Depending on what I am working on, I might use a second Windows 10 VM that I will clone from the existing. I have a snapshot of this VM from a basic state to easily revert to
  • 1 Kali VM - I use this with TryHackMe and Hack The Box, and also for home labs. I will also use a Metasploitable VM as a target
I have a Cisco Small Business Switch and SonicWall TZ400 to use in my lab as well. My PC host has a PCIe NIC card that allows me to test multiple different configurations of either switch, VLAN, subnet, routing, and firewall rules in my home lab.