 Part of the reason I love IT is there is so much technology changing all the time. It's always something new, always something new to learn, new angles for things, new software coming out, but you need a place to test it all. And that's why having your own virtual lab to me is a critical piece of infrastructure if you're in IT at all. And I know a lot of my friends who have labs at their home, even though they work for a large, even some of them working for Fortune 100 companies still have a either home setup lab or another office setup, somewhere they can build, demo their wares. Now, sometimes that's in the cloud, sometimes it's physical. It kind of depends on where your budget lies. Running it all in the cloud is kind of cool, but there is a fee that can come attached to that. We have a local lab here in our building that we use for testing software. It's how I do a lot of the YouTube demos. So I figured I would do a little bit of a walkthrough. Now, all this is the compilation of all the things that I've talked about on my channel. So I've got videos on how to set these up. I'm always going to do new versions as new version of software comes out. But for the most part, if you watched and I can link to any of the videos like how to set up XCPNG or how to set up PF Sense or how to set up Unify, this is putting all that together to build the lab because those are the tools that we used inside of here. So I'm going to start with, yes, it says Comcast at CrapTastic. I'm not always the huge fan of Comcast, but it's what we have here in our area. And that's what feeds our main system PF Sense. So our lab is both a lab and does have some production units in there for things we run, other stuff we run in the cloud. But today I'm mostly going to be focusing on all the lab stuff and how it works and how we set things up. So in PF Sense, we have a few VLANs to find. My IoT network, not that we have much IoT stuff, but it's mostly for testing. VLAN 69, which is our general retail customer people come in network, it's still secured, but it is segmented off from other things. The storage VLAN is not defined inside of PF Sense. It's literally just for storage. And I'll cover that in a second with the 16 port 10 gig Unify switch. And then these VLANs come out to the Unify where we define them and then it propagates to the other Unifies. Now I do have this other network, which is not something we're really going to be covering either, but it just exists. So you know, if you see it, this is like the production network is that too. And it goes to an unmanaged switch. It's not even a VLAN. I didn't want anything shared across it. It's strictly for production environment. And that's where we keep anything production is on that network. It's kind of also a stopgag safety that you can't just swap a VLAN port and end up on our production network somehow by accident or by clicking. That's part of the reason I set it up that way. And it doesn't need to be in a managed switch because we don't really have to handle things that we host ourselves here at our office, couple of knowledge collections of things that's all separate on there. So that's why it's on an unmanaged switch. FreeNAS is the backend storage for the two XCPNG servers. They do have local storage. They do have all the extra storage being on these two devices here. Mostly this one now is just a backup and this one is a primary where we actually have both an iSCSI and an NFS. I have both on there mostly because I've done the testing and proved that they're very within a few clicks of each other and percentage points for speed. But it's also for when people ask questions, can I do this with iSCSI? Having it already configured in FreeNAS and when I do FreeNAS updates, I like to say whether or not things work properly. I like to test NFS and iSCSI every time I do an update. So I have virtual machines and storage attached both there and we'll get to how that works in a second. Now, a little bit further down is where we have VLAN 10 undefined VLAN Studio undefined VLAN Studio 200 undefined. Now undefined means when I create networks that are not defined in PF Sense and they're defined dynamically based on whatever I attach to them. And basically with a VLAN, if you're not familiar with them, go back and do some reading because it's definitely a critical knowledge point to have VLANs in here. They allow you to take one physical cable and logically divide that network up into multiple pieces. And this is obviously really critical for the lab because I wanna be able to take a port on a Unify or even a virtual port inside of a virtual machine running XCPNG and be able to dynamically change a network within there without having to go physically move wires. If you wanna iterate fast, if you wanna load something up, build a demo real quick and attach it, I wanna be able to do that without thinking much about it in terms of, okay, which cable goes where and things like that. So everything we define with the VLANs and the VLANs on the Unify are very easy because we have several Unify switches here. We define it and it propagates everywhere automatically to the other Unify switches. So in terms of Unify switches, though, we have a 24 port Unify in the rack, the 16 port 10 gig Unify in the rack, then we have a 24 port Unify upfront. And because we have a larger retail area, there's also like a couple unmanaged switches and not really relevant to this talk, but they're there just to help propagate the 172 network. Then we have our office computers plugged in to some of the Unify switches and we have another Unify 24 port POV in the studio area. And the reason that's there is so we can easily test things in a studio. We just built a new studio rack which is kind of to extend the testing. So it's easy for me in the studio to define a port that may be attached to a virtual machine on its own network with one of these undefined networks with the studio and we'll show you how that works. So there's all the definitions here. Let's talk about a little bit how it looks. So I have a full rack tour but I figured I'd grab a photo real quick. This is just the basics of, you know, here's those SFP pluses. That's how we attach the lab in the backend to FreeNAS and they're all on this defined dot 10 network that's exclusive for just storage. Having just a standard storage VLAN that doesn't interact at all means I can trust my storage network for the most part that nothing else can get onto that network. So they're defined right here. They connect to the FreeNASs. They connect to the XCPNG. This allows me to have backend access at 10 gig to the storage devices. So that's how we define the storage in there. And there's that unmanaged switch. Yes, it's a TP link. It was on sale and whatever, they work perfectly fine. Like I said, this is the lock it down network so to speak because we have nothing but production stuff on there. So nothing else to be plugged into this. And by the way, I know someone's gonna point out but you should disable all the other ports. Yeah, but once you have physical access you could move things around and pull it out but that's a whole different debate that I don't feel like having right now. Then over here is the unified switch and everything's plugged in. We try to keep things nice and neat and defined. If you're wondering why there's labels over here this is because when we forward over to other patch panels this actually brings you to other patch panels in the building so we redefine what ports they are on those patch panels for a label purposes. So that's that. The stack of servers. Like I said, you can go in-depth on that on the Rack video. I'll do that and this is the Studio Rack. I have yet to make a video on it but we'll be soon. I'm waiting for some more parts to come in. But this is how we can easily define things on this network. Now this particular 1U box right here is a currently running PFSense but is our lab machine so I can just load whatever I want on it. And then we've got an extra network card in here that it just because it looks nicer so I plugged into these ports but they're zero, one, two and three as in IGB zero, IGB one. And what those are in PFSense is what it's running right now. Those are the network ports as they're defined so then I label them inside the Unify as they're defined and I'll get to that when we show how the virtual machines work and how we move the networks around. Now going back to how they're defined in Unify. So we don't use a USG like I said we have a PFSense at the head end of the network and having a PFSense at the head end of the network means you define VLAN only when you create networks. So there's two ways to create networks essentially well more than two but for the purposes you can create like a standard network and if you had a USG this would actually create that extra network on a USG device. I don't dislike the USGs I just find them very basic so if you have a lot of advanced things you want to do the USGs just kind of fall flat and they just have very basic features or a quality product in terms of we haven't any problems with the ones we've deployed but once you start needing a lot of advanced features they don't really have as much advanced features as I like therefore we use a we have sense at the head end of our network. Now when you're defining any VLAN you just define it as VLAN only and we can call this VLAN test and come up with a name, hit save and it automatically propagates to all the other switches and we try to label these each one but if I need to change a label, change anything it's really arbitrary and I like the way they've made it very simple and unified to manage set up configuration of VLANs defining VLANs and in a moment I define them like I said it propagates out to everything so it becomes very simple. Let's look at the switches themselves as the devices so under topology map you can see how each one of these propagates out and how they're connected so starts with that switch in a rack which is fed by the PF sense box we have then goes into our device we call the air rectangle which is just a beta version sent to us back when it was in testing the WiFi base station XG because it's a beta unit it's not the full defined one but we've been testing it ever since we did a review of that it's a pretty cool WiFi and that's what provides our 5G WiFi because we actually have this really old 2.4 only and yes it's only connected at 100 because it's that old and it just still works so we haven't gotten rid of it and this handles the 5G and this handles the 2.4 in the network so in this closer to the front of the building this is at the back that's why this one's plugged into the rack and this one's plugged in here but once again those VLANs being defined means as soon as I push it out all those VLAN settings come over here to all the switches now when you're setting up unify switches and setting up the VLANs one of the important aspects is that the interconnects between here so from this one to this one to any of these be set to all let me show you what I mean by that when you're defining ports in unify front unify switch I can actually probably rename it to be front in rack if I wanted to but front unify switch you want the profile to be all so here when you're changing VLANs you can see I have the option I could say well it just goes to the LAN you want everything and it referred to as trunk ports you want everything from each switch to be forwarded to the next switch so on and so forth that way as these are defined that's forwarding over there this is a point of confusion I've seen a few people have where they go I have a hard time understanding why I can't get this switch to work and I'm like we see a switch profile when they connect between the switches not set to all this is what gets the VLANs to propagate to everything all the way down to the Wi-Fi and that's an important factor because if I wanted to build something in my lab and create it on its own VLAN like one of those undefined VLANs I then have to forward it over somewhere such as the Wi-Fi where you define VLANs in here or a specific port on one of the unify switches to get something to plug into that you need to be able to define it those switches that are maybe two switches down and having all all all travel between the switches till it gets to the last port you want then you switch the settings to that and that's where we'll cover like the studio switch because we have a few of them very differently defined here now the studio switch pop this out go to the ports this is for a demo I have coming up I didn't get a video done on this so this one's profile is named a little bit differently but here is that lab so if we look back at the photo here and we see one two and three at the bottom here well three two one and then they're plugged in and we'll go back over to the switch and we see that they're plugged in here so we can see the definition this one's called studio lab PF Sense LAN 2 and if you see the profile says studio 200 VLAN this one says studio 100 VLAN and this one says VLAN 69 so what that's doing is feeding it VLAN 69 so it's gonna have and I'll show you I have PF Sense running on it so let's log into it and actually walk through that real quick so if we look at the clients hey look studio lab PF Sense and there's the IP address of it so it makes it really easy to find because it knows what IPs are plugged into that port so now we're logged into it it's at 172.16.69.144 now let's look at what's defined behind it just to make things a little bit easier I defined two networks LAN and LAN 2 192.168.100.1 and 200.1 and they're attached to those studio VLANs so let's look at that a little bit closer go ahead and edit and we've got studio lab PF Sense LAN 1 and the profile of this particular port has been set to studio 100 VLAN now let's cover a couple things real quick about the VLANs like I said some are defined and some are undefined so if we go over here to my main PF Sense the only defined VLANs as I said inside a PF Sense that are attached to the LAN port is 69 and 50 the rest of them are just defined in unify for all my lab usage or my storage usage it's not defined here so it does not need to define the PF Sense because this particular this is my head end PF Sense not my lab one is not handling those networks I want those labs to be able to be handled for demonstration purposes in one of my lab PF Senses so this is the lab PF Sense assigned 192.168.100 and go DHCP server we see enable DHCP now because the port is not a trunk port I don't need to define some type of VLAN inside of here as far as this system is concerned it's just plugged into a physical port so when we go to interfaces assignments IGB 0, LAN, IGB 1, LAN, IGB 2, LAN, 2 look at the photos they're physical ports not VLANs so what you do is define them inside a profile so this particular port means VLAN 100 now because VLAN 100 is defined all the way across all the unifies and let's go back over to the XCPMG server this is running Zen Orchestra now we can find that VLAN port so let's find it over here this is just the list of networks and I defined in these Studio 100 VLAN Studio 200 VLAN and all these go over ETH 0 and we'll pull up the map again so essentially ETH 0 is this orange line here they're all the same so all these VLANs uh... 3.0 is the main as in the native LAN these are the ones defined inside of PF Sense, the head end one and then these are just the defined ones inside the unified so we defined them but then we've taken these VLAN tag 100, tag 200 and VLAN 10 to find them in unify and then to find them again here and here's the VLAN tag 100 tag 200 I know it seems a little complicated but let's watch this in action once you kind of get the concept that these VLANs all on a shared medium all across all of these we're gonna go over here and look at some of the VMs running and we're gonna go and grab my Parrot VM network so currently my Parrot VM is at 192.1683.25 I call it the .3 network that's the native no VLAN so let's go look at the security again in the VLAN settings so .3 E0 VLAN 0 as in no VLAN uh... none it just puts a zero in there uh... so that's your native network as they call it then we look down there we're gonna look at the studio one studio 100 connected also to E0 same physical cable then we go over here and we see that we can change the network so we're gonna click it switch to studio 100 and when you do this because I've got these end tools installed you can swap the networks on the fly like this no need to restart the server and it just lets me know that the network went away and came back look at the IP address and now it's defined as 192.168 100.101 and how does that work so let's follow it all the way back so here's the IP address of it we go over here to the studio lab we see that interfaces that should be LAN 1 is the new 100 range over here services DHCP server we see the parent lease right here so it's coming all the way through to this physical box right here and it's following through because that physical box plugged in right here and then defined as studio VLAN VLAN 100 here comes all the way through so we've now taken that physical port we said that physical port is VLAN 100 and the PF sense hands it off and it pipes all the way back accrue off the same network interface that's carrying other VLANs and brings it all the way over to here now a side note about VLANs always to remember they are a shared medium even though we're logically defining all these networks across a one physical cable that does not give it any more than the single gigabit of bandwidth that it's able to do but for lab testing when you're not is worried about bandwidth issues they're really great sometimes you do want to still define out networks of physically separate due to bandwidth and things like that is your unit want to share the medium if you have high capacity demands or get ten gig networks as you can see we can take something running in the studio pipe it back through the entire unify network and back over to our lab and then have this sitting behind a firewall to do any types of demos with and how this computer's connected there but what about connecting it to something local about building your own virtual machines and labs there let's look at that too so we're gonna go here lab and uh... here's my pf sense lab so we'll go ahead and fire this up before we do let's figure out where the network interfaces that are there i've got my vlan sixty nine i need to feed it so this is actually gonna be the wanside on this one because of uh... as as i set up this pf sense lab demo i did it with the first interface being the wanside and then to lands in between a land of zen is interesting because which you can define was in server pretty easy to do you can say i want to define this so every thing is only inside is in server and ever leaves it so it has its own internal networks that are referred to as host only those are great for sandboxing because they never touched the physical ethernet adapters on it so you can define as many of those as you want and build laps directly in then server without them leaving so if you want to do some more thorough testing or test something more dangerous uh... like some type of spyware virus stuff that's great because it creates a lab that can't escape besides the other tools that you give it to escape for example you create a virtual firewall and define it in there so we'll leave this a land of zen and by the way it's defined uh... there's ways to get it to bridge across multiple servers we have it in a one physical server so land of zen two and land of zen one are both internal only to that particular server because we have two xcp ng servers then here's this other vlan ten as i call it lab undefined let's go ahead and fire up pf sense lab two now it goes back to saying no ip record until it boots back up uh... there's a guide you can pretty fine find pretty easily uh... pf sense and xcp ng or uh... pf sense and zen server there's a couple extra things you can add to get uh... more enhanced zen server tools inside of uh... the pf sense that way it gets the network interface uh... it's there is a free bsd package for it all probably covered in different video but you can google it and find there's a github instruction for this now this is booting up like normal just like any pf sense install i'll go ahead and fast forward this alright so now this one's up and running like i said our when is the first network interface so we put it in the one seven two network gotta get your internet from somewhere uh... the land is defined as one nine two one six eight that's that lands and then we have uh... actually called iot as i was doing a demo but it's a dot ten network so we're gonna log into that and this is what looks like logged into it so on the latest version everything set up firewall make sure we have a dcp server we do like said this is all running virtual we have one on land we have one on iot uh... it's called iot here but it's like i said that i should probably rename it alright renamed it land 2 that's actually what it is for purposes of this demo and uh... let's put something behind it so land 2 is right there that's uh... technically the third interface so we have the first second and third we look at interface assignments xn0 xn1 xn2 look at the networks virtual interface zero one and two here's all the ip address is defined we have to attach them somewhere so this is such to vlan 10 lab so how do we get my parrot instance behind in the lab let's go ahead over here in the network and we just change it to lab so vlan 10 lab disconnected connected look at the council hey look it gave me the message again and we are now ten dot ten dot one oh six let's go over here services dhcp server it and there we are parrot requested via accident use now i can do any type of testing behind this network and start defining more computers attach them on there and i've done this with windows and linux and everything but this is how you build out the labs in terms of that you can just dynamically assign interface dynamically assign them it's pretty simple but this is how you can iterate fast and spin up different servers and get them done so i actually have an untangle demo the same thing if i want to fire up untangle define the networks on the lab this is where you can create a mess so i'm feeding it off this network and i define a lab vlan 10 lab here this has its own dhcp server so does pf sense so if you were to do this if you want to know what happens when you do this it's not exciting by the way uh... but being able to uh... being able to define them and put them on the same network allows from all kinds of fun experimentation uh... doing that now you'll get like conflicts and you know troubleshooting and things like that now the other thing you can do is the other way around we have that pf sense in the physical real world that's attached there we could feed and we can i'll look at this other pf sense that's running this lab two one here network we're feeding it the standard vlan 69 but we could easily feed it and put it behind another pf sense over here so we could you know double-knat them around and put it to studio one hundred to two hundred and pull from the ports on there etc etc uh... so it's very dynamic having you know the xcp ng servers and having all these vlands defined it makes it very simple to do this now you may have noticed the snapshots here now let's jump into some of the how we build out the machines and how we do things inside the lab here with xcp ng i did this because there was an update i always do a snapshot before an update we're going ahead and delete it i don't need the snapshot anymore and let's talk about how we just manage the virtual machines so we're gonna head and start from this page right here so we have a couple different tags in here like production vms don't mess with these they're all production this is kind of the rule for what i'm doing these if it's tagged production don't mess with it so yes we host invoice ninja in here you just add tags to it whatever tag you want and then you can filter them out later like this i've done reviews as an orchestra i have a lot of things labeled test and easy enough to use and manage that so just tag all your production stuff so you can like separate that out at least that that does help because maybe you shouldn't be running both production error but it's handy because they're kind of related and i've been doing this a long time so i'm fairly uh... careful with all these things so here's my pf sense lab two that i have set up go to the council and we can just go ahead and shut this one down well that's shutting down let's type in the lab to show all the things i have in here i have this debbie in nine base and then i have this one here because i was doing some testings on the scuzzy disk over here and i've got some real in-depth xcp and g uh... videos to show how to set things up in in great detail but in short what we do is pull up the lab again so here's there's pf sense lab what if we wanted to make another copy of it that's actually pretty easy so you can actually just hit fast clone and now there's a clone of it that quick and i can start and now i have a clone that i can define differently console screw up do whatever i want with and when i'm done i can simply destroy it now i'm using these in orchestra if you notice at the top here this version is not bundled any support nor updates do with caution i have a video on how you can self compile this for your lab for production or for business they have a paid version that we use for businesses in production that's what we encourage anyone using this to buy but this is the full open source compiled myself version and i've got a video on how to do that if you look at how to set up the open source and compile yourself to an orchestra so i'm pretty slick so we're gonna go ahead and uh... let's mess this thing up i just we're gonna go for shutdown destroy this a second all right it's down remove and now we've deleted it really nice with xcp ng i have found their system ultra easy to use combined with zen orchestra to be able to fire up a virtual machine i fire up a lot of debut machines you create i have this base install and the reason i have a base install is so i can easily keep it up to date and then clone it as needed so we're gonna boot this one up in each one of these is living back on that uh... free nascent doser and like i said i have a very in depth video about setting up xcp ng and how to attach devices but here's all my you know shared nfs and i have one on shared ice-cozzie council it boots up really fast so i can make sure this is up to date update it real quick see if there's anything needs to be done nothing needs to be done shut it down real quick and let's make some clones so we can just hit fast clone we're doing this in real time i'm not going to fast-forward this fast clone and uh... it names them clones so here's two clones let's go ahead and start the clones start to vm sure and just like that i clone two instances that i can then build whatever i want to build into them start using for testing load some software someone said looks pretty cool to find what network they're on they're going to default when you clone them to whatever network the base was defined but it's arbitrary to go back here and once again i can attach them to whatever network i want to attach it but this needs to be on this vlan or it needs to be one of my lab demos it's really dynamic also you have to do this with it shut down well actually i think once the tools loaded i can do it while it's shut let's define two networks on this one i want the other end of this in here so i'm going to hit create and on the fly because this has the tools loaded i just attach it to the studio two hundred added another interface and by the way let's see how that looks in here now it has two network interfaces and can get an address on each one in a second okay i have to define it inside the virtual machine itself but you can see it attached the other network interface but it's not set to dcp by default so shut this one down the same thing when i want to delete these remove these or start them in group you can just by doing this i should go i can take them take these two vms start them stop them reboot them migrate them to another machine if i wanted to or remove them force reboot force you know suspend we're going to delete both of these i do like this you got to type this out and won't let you do this either see i won't let you copy paste delete two vms all right spelled it correctly so it's gonna let me destroy these vms so next thing is what about brand new vms how do i create more of them well that's actually pretty simple there's a couple options here so you can import them you have to figure out where you want to land them you can drop ova or xva files here to import a virtual machine no problem uh... if you are familiar with ova the open virtualization standard uh... and you can just drag these in and import them that's one way in a lot of different tools sometimes they have them prepped in uh... ready to go other options in one of the ones we use here is sometimes cloning things in so if you need to go from physical to virtual uh... you can do things like set up in boot off of a clone zilla and bring it in there or whatever tool you want to do cloning and of course the most common way is we're gonna go to new vm here and now we're going to choose a template that matches and we can choose windows if you're a windows person to find a windows server in here do it like this or i'm gonna go back to uh... debian and then these are just templates that kinda get you started but they don't have the iso in here this where you have for the isos let me show you a little bit how this works in the storage so here's how we loaded parrot security we chose that it was a debian based install we called it parrot test how many cpus we're gonna give it eight cpus two fifty six megabytes not enough so we're gonna go ahead and give it uh... four gigs of ram set up to boot off parrot what network do we want to attach to uh... go ahead and attach to this one here for now select storage repository let's put it on this one here the dozer scuzzy but i have there and then of course the local storage options and then uh... give these a name i can add more discs if i wanted to and add more things probably want at least an eighty gig disc for this show advanced settings this is actually pretty cool too boot vm after creation but you can also uh... create multiple vms in a naming pattern so if you wanted to create five of these at once it will create five of these at once and build them uh... on a naming pattern so name percent ones like you know first index last index uh... it would go parent one parent two parent three etc etc so if you wanted to do that definitely kind of need but fairly quick though we can go here and then we're going to go ahead and hit create now as far as how those isos got there amusingly next to show you with my Linux machine here this is just a share an SMB share off of my free nas machine three dot eight and then you put all the ISO files in there uh... that's one thing about there are ways to get installed within the Zen server itself but they're not officially supported where you can copy the isos but if you're building a home lab i would say it's okay to do that if you want to copy isos directly onto your Zen server ideally it's supposed to look for a uh... SMB mount and pull all the isos from the SMB mount so here's our parent completely defined i told not to start on boot uh... but we can we're gonna have fired up real quick start and when you're in the uh... this year forgot to change a boot order so it's going to try a boot off network first and hard drive then dvd and there we go now i can actually if i wanted to pair it in a live mode easy enough and way we go we would start install of whatever you want to install now inside of our vm's here we do have a few different windows ones as well so i've got uh... couple rmm demos i was doing for other stuff and just a generic new vm scuzzy tests and then uh... a windows server twenty sixteen sixty four bit evale we will sometimes evale tools on here and i use them for my youtube demos but i guess that you can define linux virtual machines whatever you want and it's specially with windows it's wonderful being able to quickly clone them because windows is much it in my opinion much more difficult when you load software you want to clean environment again in updates and problems it's easier to clone each one so you have a base by which to work from so that makes it really easy you know when you're setting all this up so let's go back over here to parrot and it's still booting live cd but it boots up reasonably faster it does seem to be a little slower when i pull things off the smb shares but so reasonable enough this is all in real time so it took you know i don't know twenty seconds to boot not not that unreasonable based on the machines we're using there's some older rs dell r7 tens so can i get you an idea though that this is how we quickly spin things up this is how quickly to find the labs uh... and then once again was going to force shut down this machine because i don't need it running and then we'll go ahead and destroy it as well as i don't need the virtual machine i created and it just wiped it off all the systems that it was on and away we go over right back to a nice clean lab i guess that this is the way we handle things on here it's very fast it's very easy uh... in i have a couple more videos that you may see coming on shinobi and things like that this is how we define some of those we started the db and base and then we forked it over to here uh... so we created this one so this will be another video i do which still has a default password in it that's a nice thing you can define inside the description sometimes i'll put that like with the default is on setting it up makes it convenient it's not a security thing obviously it's a really bad security practice they have anything production like that but when you're doing a demo when i first load something all they did was load it and the default passwords admin because i haven't changed it yet so this is how it's going to start for the video but hopefully this was enlightening of how we handle some of the labs how we how my lab works all the tools we're using like i said it's free nas it's xcp ng with zen orchestra as the admin interface that allows me to iterate fast allows me to you know stand up a machine really quick uh... move from the physical layer in the studio back to the back-end layer here and like i said defining a network no time at all i go in here and just redefine a vlan inside of unify and define the vlan here and attach it to the ethernet port and i do it all from my seat right here without getting up i can you know have an idea in my head and followed all the way through and this is why to me you know a virtual labs so important to have in able to you know make all these things happen now a couple comments that we'll have someone's gonna say why not vmware why not proxmox etc etc or why not hyper-v if you are defining a virtual lab you should be if you're working for example to become a vmware certified i would recommend vmware if you just like proxmox better because whatever reasons and i've done a comparison video they're both excellent utilities and use proxmox uh... this concept is the same it's about being able to have an environment that you can test these things and set them up i'm really comfortable in this environment i think it works really well and we've done a lot of consulting work as we have a similar production only environments at some of our larger clients that are running these n servers and this is all zen version 7.6 it's still being very actively developed uh... they just announced as of may 22nd 2019 xcp ng8 beta release uh... which new updated kernel updated hypervisor updated control domain os sent to west once again this is all open source they're being very actively developed like i said all the latest patches kernel patches security patches uh... the the project has actually been very very well supported we've been running it now for quite a while i'm really happy with it and the one of the most important things about these virtual labs is making it you know easy to get things done fast and uh... also i like the fact that i can define networks without having to run around plugging a bunch of physical hardware in all the time and get something done fast so i can spin it up fast and make it into a youtube video or tutorial or just test out an idea i have uh... alright i'll leave links to all the build videos that are involved in getting some of this tools set up uh... that i've done previously but this is our tour of our lab twenty nineteen thanks for watching thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button in the bell icon and maybe youtube will send you a notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to laurencesystems.com where we offer both uh... business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion 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