There is no doubt about it – to get good at IT, coding, etc you need hands on practice. But how to do it – without actually having a lot of kit?
The solution is to emulate it. Modern processors, almost all of them in the last ten years or so can support virtualisation technologies. This lets you run a lot of virtual machines, with their own network cards, disks, CDroms, etc inside one machine…
This for instance, is my laptop. It’s running a copy of VMware Workstation Pro, and you can see there are a number of virtual machines that have been created.
There are images of some Windows 2016 and 2019 test servers, an old copy of windows 95, just to remind you what computing was like 30 years ago, and a running copy of Linux Mint Debian Edition. Incidentally, if you dont like the way Debain looks, try LMDE instead. Very slick indeed….
Workstation will happily run dozens of machines at once on a laptop if you have enough ram – mine has 64GB ram and I can easily persuade 25 machines with a couple of GB of ram each to start up. Modern kit is really quite overpowered for some things, but it comes in useful for this.
The only snag with Workstation is that it’s not free and demands money… If you just want to try it out then an excellent, totally free alternative is something called VirtualBox, https://www.virtualbox.org/ If you want to build a homelab, this is the place to start.
As well as programs that run on a copy of Windows or Linux, you can also get ones that replace your operating system entirely. If you have a spare PC lying around with a fair bit of RAM and disc then something called ProxMox https://www.proxmox.com/en/is another alternative, although this will require a lot more work up front. If there is enough interest, I will probably put up an article about setting up your own ProxMox home environment.