The most important aspect of a technology enthusiast is the equipment, the more equipment you have the more tests you can do resulting in an increased amount of knowledge accompanied with hands on experience.
Personally I dream of my own personal data center ;-), not too ambitious AM I! Look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t want one too!!
Mobile lab consists of:
- HP EliteBook 8540w / Core i7 processor / 24GB memory / 1 x 512GB Transcend SSD HDD / 1 x 254GB Transcend SSD HDD.
- HP Elitebook 8560w / Core i7 processor / 24GB memory / 1 x 512GB Transcend SSD HDD / 1 x 254GB Transcend SSD HDD.
- Cisco Small Business gigabit switch (unmanageable).
- 3COM 3CDSG8 / HP 1900-8G switch (manageable).
- Synology DS214se with two 3TB HDD’s (RAID 1).
Mobile lab (Personal) @ The Office:
Mobile lab (Personal) @ Home:
PS: This is the living room and I have successfully conquered 15% of it :-P.
The first workstation is my primary work hub and I use VMware Workstation on it, on the other hand the second workstation hosts ESXi 5.5 courtesy of > this blog post < ;-) and you can expect that I do a lot of nesting, also there is the Synology which I use as a shared storage.
Work Lab (I am going to steal it one day :-P):
Well I work for an HP partner and we have a lot of demo equipment that we test with along with our production environment because if all fails they know I won’t spare the production environment when I need to test something and there are not enough resources.
I am saving money to build a decent lab at home, and hopefully within the next year I will be able to get something _hopefully_.
Finally I would just like to point out that you don’t need expensive equipment to promote your knowledge I remember that I started my days with a 56Mhz notebook and don’t be cheap when it comes to your career, the more you give it the more it will give you.