If you want to play around and see if it could help you, you could start with a couple cloud based systems first. Amazon Web services and Google both have permanent free tiers and linode and digitalocean both have pretty good free trials.

If you want to play around and see if it could help you, you could start with a couple cloud based systems first. Amazon Web services and Google both have permanent free tiers and linode and digitalocean both have pretty good free trials.

The investment I made into a QNAP for Plex to replace all my streaming 5 years ago has already paid itself off. It’s also ridiculous convenient if you setup something like a NUC with ESXi to get to labbing straight away with lower energy consumption. Think of it beyond terms of just practice.

Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher from the 1500s, wrote three volumes of essays full of anecdotes from history both ancient and recent (to him), some amusing, others tragic. If you were to summarize this work in one sentence, you could say, “anything that can happen, does”. Specifically, the opening essay on the first volume is titled, That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End, while the twenty-third essay in the same volume bears the heading Various Events from the Same Counsel.

Getting back to the matter at hand, the answer is, nobody knows (or, as Montaigne himself used to put it, ''Que sçay-je?", “What do I know?”). There are people whose careers have been helped by their homelab exploits, people who have been passed over because the person in charge looked at their homelabbing askance, and people in whose careers it simply never came up. Sometimes, the same person has experienced both extremes and plenty of in-between…

depends on what niche you wanna go into. if you want to be a competent overall IT professional I would recommend a couple of servers to learn the basics and get familiar with the genre of hardware. cisco stuff isn’t too important if you have any concept of hardware/software.