One of the benefits of having a home lab is that you have your own environment to build and test workloads without impacting any corporate systems.  This is great for testing out techniques and ideas and furthering your own knowledge of various systems.

Licensing a home lab can be a challenge, though.  A good lab should, ideally, be representative of a production environment.  For many environments, that means running vSphere, Windows Server, and possibly other business applications like SQL Server.

Unless you have a deep bank account to buy commercial licenses or are accepted into a program that provides licensing, acquiring licenses for a home lab can be very tough.  The main source of licensing is time-limited trial licensing that requires the lab to be rebuilt every 60-180 days depending on the product.  Tools like AutoLab help greatly with this by automating the lab building process.

But what options are available for those who want a more stable lab that doesn’t need to be rebuilt frequently?  The options there are a little more limited. Details on those options are below:

• Microsoft: The very low-cost TechNet subscriptions used to cover this ground, but years of abuse and a shifting focus towards cloud services led to this service being discontinued in September 2013.  The official replacement for TechNet was long-term evaluation software from the TechNet Evaluation Center.  If evaluations aren’t your cup of tea, there are two options:
• MSDN Subscriptions: MSDN subscriptions offer licensed software that developers can use, and they had fewer restrictions than the TechNet subscriptions.  There are a variety of MSDN subscription options, and some include Visual Studio and all products in the Microsoft catalog.  The most affordable option for a Home Lab is the MSDN Operating Systems subscription which is $799 per year.
• Microsoft Action Pack: The Microsoft Action Pack is a subscription option for registered small business partners that provides some licensed software products for internal use.  This subscription can include Office 365 product use rights.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials – This is a lower-cost Windows Server license for one server up to 25 users.  The server running the essentials role would need to be the root domain controller in a domain with all the FSMO roles.  It also provides features to integrate with Microsoft Online Services such as Office 365.  If you use this option, you could have a core server without any time-limited licensing and utilize trials for other servers or services.
• VMware:  VMware used to have a program similar to TechNet, but that was discontinued many years ago.  There are two options that home labs can take advantage of, though.
• vSphere Free Hypervisor: A feature limited version of vSphere that cannot be managed by vCenter and has no writeable commandline access. 
• vSphere Essentials: The Essentials kit includes vCenter and the vSphere Hypervisor for up to three hosts.  The cheapest version of this kit does not include vMotion or the other features of the regular commercial licensing tiers, but it does provide for licensed home lab software.
• Linux Solutions: There are a number of Linux-based solutions that are free or very low cost.  There are Linux solutions that can provide similar functionality to Active Directory.

There is a big push in the industry towards automation – and for good reason.  IT departments are being tasked to do more with less, and automation enables them to do that.  A lot of the focus on automation is around DevOps, configuration management, and enabling self-service application deployment.

A lot of the tools to support these areas are built for larger enterprises where there is a need to build up or scale out production applications quickly or deploy full application stacks for testing.

It makes sense to automate in larger enterprises as there are a lot of benefits.  It enables IT to be more responsive to the business and internal customers.  Giving developers the tools to deploy their own application stacks frees up sysadmins to work on other tasks, and there is usually a resource or two that can become an expert on the automation and find ways to utilize it to drive more value out of it.

But what about smaller environments?  IT staffs are usually pretty small and focused on putting out the fires before they burn down the facility.  Procedures aren’t always well defined or even defined enough to automate a task.  They’re probably not deploying a lot of new applications or servers for production or development environments, and the applications that are deployed most likely benefit from scaling servers up rather than scaling out.

Automation tools like vRAC and Puppet Enterprise are usually too complex and too expensive for this space, and even if the budget is there, the business case isn’t. 

And yet the SMB space is probably the space that can benefit from automation the most.  So how can they utilize their limited resources to do more with less?

There are a couple of tips I have for automating in an SMB:

1. Understand where you will get the most value from automating – There are still tasks that you need to do on a regular basis, or there are infrequent tasks that are time consuming.  Maybe its provisioning, or terming, a new user.  Maybe its creating mailboxes in Exchange or running a report manually.  There is value in automating these routine tasks, and you will recover the time you put into it pretty quickly.
2. Document your processes – As you run through a task that you plan to automate, put the process down on paper.  You can’t automate a process if you don’t know how it should run.  Documentation can also help with troubleshooting after you’ve automated the process.
3. Start Small – Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it takes time to program and troubleshoot a script.  Start small by automating the most common or time consuming parts of the task and then add features as you have time or need them.
4. Avoid Scope Creep – It’s easy to get carried away as you start to automate tasks and processes.  But if you’re not going to get any value from automating a task, move it to the bottom of the list.  The last thing you want to do is to spend so much time on a low-priority task that other, higher priority tasks slip. 
5. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – You can find script repositories and tutorials for many tasks in just about any language.  Use these as a base and modify them to fit your environment rather than writing something from scratch.
6. Dedicate Time – Time is a premium commodity in the SMB IT departments that I’ve worked in.  Automating frequent and/or time consuming tasks will be a net time gainer, and you will gain that time back down the road. 

Earlier this week, Gina Minks posted an article called “The 1st Story I Never Wanted to Leave.”  John Price also posted about this today.  I thought the concept was fascinating, and I wanted to share something in this vein.

I was an avid reader when I was growing up.  I was often reading something, and I loved hanging out in the Sci-Fi section of my local Barnes and Noble. 

The book that really stands out to me is Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I don’t remember exactly when I read Red Mars for the first time, but the first book in the Mars Trilogy was extremely immersive.  I could imagine myself riding along with John Boone, Maya Toitovna, and the rest of the First 100 as they explored the red planet and built a new home.  Although this series did continue with two other books, by the time I got to Blue Mars, I started to lose interest in the series as the red planet became more earth-like and the feel of the story changed from colonizing a new world to politics and building a government.

I reread Red Mars earlier this year, and one thing that stood out to me was that there was so much I missed when I read it as a teenager.  I didn’t have the life experience to really understand the characters or the situation they were in.  As a teenager, I saw it as a cool story about people living on another world, but as an adult, I could relate to the characters better and understand the situation they went into.  I could also better appreciate the language that Robinson used.

This book made a huge impact on me, and there are days where I want to sit down and write about intrepid explorers trekking across the surface of Mars.