Well then. It's been a while, hasn't it? This seems to happen a bit. However, this time I've actually made a bit of progress with my lab. And I mean that - a bit. The lab has grown ever so slightly, but some groundwork is being laid so that it becomes a much better learning environment.
First, I expanded my hardware. The ThinkCentre M72e that I mentioned in my last post ended up having problems with ESXi, so I couldn't use it as a second host. I did try Proxmox on it, but I didn't like how heterogeneous that made my lab. On top of that, the fan started getting really loud really fast, so I believe the hardware was hitting its end of life. Thus, a replacement was ordered - an ultra-small form factor Dell Optiplex 7050. I splurged a bit and got a model with an i7 and 32 GB of memory, which brings my total logical core count to 12 and total memory available in the lab to 48 GB, tripling the old values. I slapped an 860 Evo in there and installed ESXi and it seems to be working well so far. I've only spun up a couple of VMs on it, but that's part of establishing my backbone first.
The two VMs I've set up are mainly going to be providing services to help with VM creation and setup. The first will be a basic git server, I'm still deciding what web front-end I want to use. I'm leaning toward cgit since this will primarily be a private server, but Gitea also looks like a good option. I want to look into extra storage options for this before running with it though, since the VM only has roughly 32 GB of storage available to it at the moment.
The second VM that I've been working on is much more critical to that backbone. It's supposed to be a PXE boot server, but right now it's just a ftp server. I have the files loaded up and ready to go, but for some reason I can't get other machines on my local network to recognize it, and so VMs don't boot from the network properly. It should be serving files to install Rocky Linux (I'm replacing CentOS due to last year's news, and want to stick close to RHEL for learning purposes), but so far I can only view the files when directly accessing it through a browser or other ftp client. I also started working on a Kickstart file so I can automate installs, but right now that's an afterthought for after PXE works.
There's a final VM that resides on the old server that I'm going to work on a bit. I have Nginx installed and I'm looking into setting up a reverse proxy, but it's a work in progress. Part of the issue is that I don't have services to proxy - the only working servers on my lab are are Minecraft servers and test VMs. Still, once I do have services started up, I should be able to redirect them pretty quickly.
Last, there's more hardware to set up. I still have that ASUS VivoPC that's sitting unused currently. I also happen to have a 3 TB 7200 RPM HDD left over from my old PC. I need to double-check that I don't need any files from it (I shouldn't, everything was recovered from backups) but after that, I can wipe it, put Rocky Linux on it, then set it up as my NextCloud host. I'll make a few configuration changes from the last few attempts, like just letting the Nextcloud user reside in /home, but the big kicker is going to be almost 3 TB of storage readily available in one drive. No more messing with expanding LVMs or allocating an external drive as the storage area, I'm just keeping it simple and going bare-metal. I want this to be a usable service, so I'm simplifying it and then using the lab to learn. Honestly, the git server is where I'll be messing with some of this. Maybe I can allocate storage from Nextcloud as nfs or something similar?
Anyway, I feel like I have a good plan mapped out, and progress to be made. Once PXE is working, then everything else should accelerate and I can move on to learning Ansible and Puppet and really cracking down on automation! I'm the most hopeful for my lab that I've been in months, it's amazing what spending a little money for better hardware can do. And hopefully, my next post will be a real progress report with some lessons learned!