Build virtual lab for Network/System Administration

Today, i am sharing the way we can create our very own lab to practice network and system administration at home.

This information is helpful specially for the learner looking for the hands-on experience on big cisco switches, cisco routers, windows server, linux servers etc. used mainly in medium to large enterprise environment.

Networking and system are those field in technology which requires some entry level support job experience. This is where home labs can be beneficial as for some experience handling core tech equipments. However, physical equipment are really expensive. In old days people used to buy used equipment in less price to setup home lab.

Now, today we almost can replicate enterprise status at home without any real equipment. Below are maintained few technology that are used to create your virtual lab at home without any money spent :-

1. Packet Tracer : packet tracer is the most popular free simulation software developed by CISCO, used for practicing networking at home in our computer. We can perform various tasks like we do in physical network devices. It contains variety of models of cisco routers, switches, different servers services, connection types required to module a actual network. Packet tracer is great tools for at least CCNA level. Click to download it.https://www.netacad.com/courses/packet-tracer/introduction-packet-tracer
2. GNS3 : Another tool that provide solid networking setting. It is the most sort after tool we can get for labing and practice. GNS3 provides almost all network accessories like cisco routers, cisco switches, windows pc , linux pc, different servers, connections etc. It uses real ISO image file to run its system. Gns3 is handy for CCNP also CCIE level practice. If you have good computing power and want to practice implement automation GNS3 is the best option to use. Link for GNS3 https://www.gns3.com/software/download
3. cisco VIRAL labs: cisco viral lab is a virtualize software running in cloud. Using viral we can access both physical and virtual cisco equipments for free. We can use viral labs using dcloud and devnet platform. Using dcloud we can access devices using only our web browsers. We can login , select data center and choose available labs. We can also save customize labs. In devnet platform we need vpn connection for to access the devices. dcloud: https://dcloud.cisco.com devnet:https://developer.cisco.com
4. VMware or Virtualbox: Virtualization is a technology that a large business run today to fully utilize the resource of the physical equipment available and to reduce the cost virtualization is done. In virtualization more than one operating system can be operated in a single machine at the same time. It utilizes resource of a single physical machine. This is the technology we used in home to run our server without having to buy real server. Here our PC mediates to run multiple servers. VMware and virtualbox are two popular virtualization tools used at home. We can run any OS like linux different distro, windows server 2008, windows server 2012, windows server 2016, windows 2007, win10, mac os, unix etc. We can practice system administration tasks like working on active directory, sccm deployment, running apache, mysql, smb and many services in vmware or virtualbox. It can also be used for learning ethical hacking. Vmware: https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro/workstation-pro-evaluation.html virtualbox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Hope this will be pragmatic method for getting experience for network and system administration at home.