Roughly one year ago I deployed my dream home network and thought it would be interesting to expand the network to include a virtualization lab for personal as well as work use. In my consulting capacity, I typically have anywhere between 2 and 4 VMs running on my MacBook Pro using VirtualBox. Even with 16 GB of RAM and a 3.1 GHz i7, my system is typically at capacity. Even with this model, I typically have to stop some VMs so that I can start a different set depending on my active project.

My goal was to free up the system resources on my local machine and shift from running VMs locally to a remote environment. While AWS is great for work (as I do not pick up the bill), it is extremely expensive for personal use.  Naturally, this left me to find a low cost hardware solution and run my own virtualization stack.