Do I really need my own homelab?
If you were to ask me what is the most important thing you could do as a new member of IT (at almost any level) to become proficient in the world of Windows Desktop, Windows Servers, and Windows Management, my immediate question would be “do you have your own lab environment?” What I’m asking with this question is do you have your own internal environment where you can install things, uninstall things, configure things, and make mistakes that you need to recover from. You might even make mistakes that you can’t easily recover from, but that’s okay because you can just start over.
I firmly believe that it’s the quickest way to learn the most about products that you as an admin will be supporting.
Why do you need a homelab?
Lab environments are essential to learn how things work. Because of the maturity of the IT space, when you first come into a new work environment, it’s very likely that everything is already configured. If you have an on-prem environment, all the domain controllers are probably in place, many group policy rules already exist, and if you are using ConfigMgr for management it’s likely installed and configured however the previous Admin wanted it to be configured. If you are managing with Intune, it’s likely that Intune already has all the current policies configured for the environment.
Do you see the problem here? Because everything is already configured, you won’t get the benefit and knowledge of setting these things up yourself. When you have your new homelab set up you will be able to configure things from the ground up, from the most basic policies to the more complex it will all be yours! And if you “break” it, who cares? By fixing it you will learn what to do or what not to do in a real production environment.
Designing your homelab?
As you start to think about what you want to do for your homelab, you need to decide what the focus of your lab will be. Do you want to learn Intune? Are you looking for a full on-prem Configuration Manager environment? Do you want to set up co-management to learn how that is potentially the best of both worlds? Your answer to these questions is going to determine what you need. As we go further, we’ll talk more about what hardware and software you might need to create both on-prem and Intune labs.
You don’t have to break the bank!
Before you start to worry that I’m going to recommend spending multiple thousands of dollars, my very first on-prem environment that I used cost me $100 for a used Dell PowerEdge server plus $25 shipping. I could theoretically still be using it but it doesn’t support Windows 11 and it was really loud. My current on-prem “server” which is really just a Windows computer at my house, cost approximately $1600 in 2019, and I’m still using it today with no plans to make any changes. It’s possible to find something cheap, or build something that will last and not spend thousands.
What kinds of specs do I need for my environment?
The biggest thing to remember here is that you aren’t building a gaming machine or doing any crypto mining, so you don’t need to spend a ton of money on your graphics card. What you are going to want to focus on is Processor Cores, Memory size, and disk space. Figure that each VM you make is going to need a certain number of cores, a certain amount of RAM and a certain amount of Hard Drive space, and work back from there.
Just as a guide, I have a full Hyper-V environment running on a Ryzen 7 with 8 cores which hyper-threading doubles to 16 threads. RAM is never maxed out at 64GB even with all my VMs running, and I have 5 TB Total in hard drive space for the VM files.
What software and subscriptions do I need?
The software you are going to need varies depending on the environment you are setting up, but the most important thing to remember is that Microsoft provides evaluation versions of all of the products that you will need to set up your environment. For example here’s the link for the Windows Server 2025 Evaluation Version https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-server-2025. Generally the evaluation versions of Microsoft products run for 180 days with their full features. After 180 days you get an additional opportunity to install your environment as you delete everything and start over (if desired). Subscriptions for Intune are 30 days, so you might need to plan carefully for when you are going to activate that trial, but we’ll provide guidance so you can get the most of your Intune trial as well.
What do I do next?
We are updating our “How to build a ConfigMgr Lab from scratch series” to include new technology as well as configure Recast Products in that environment. So click forward when you are ready to jump in!
