Greetings everyone. I’ve been working in IT for almost a year now as a level 1/2 helpdesk technician. My career goal is to be a sysadmin someday. This week I finally got around to creating the “homelab” I’ve been putting off for a while. Currently I’m using Virtualbox on my windows 10 pc that was previously used for gaming mostly. I’ve been enjoying it so far. Love how quick and easy it is to stand up machines.
So far I have a small windows environment with a network server (AD DS, DNS, DHCP), file share and one windows 10 box. I’ve been having fun setting up those networking services and playing with group policy mainly but I know I will want more from the environment soon.
Everything is currently connected on an internal network in virtualbox. I would like to start doing some more advanced configuration with the internal network and simulate a real LAN. Adding vlans/subnets to separate hosts from servers, set up some kind of routing between them. The problem is I want it all to stay confined in virtualbox. I’m just wondering if there is a type 2 hypervisor that also has full network virtualization? I’ve seen about adding a GNS3 VM to virtualbox, would this work?
I will probably move to a type 1 hypervisor eventually and purchase the appropriate physical networking equipment to set a more complex environment eventually but for now I just don’t want to spend the money or have a server room in my home.
I was kind of toying around with the idea of adding another NIC to my pc and then linking it up to a cheaper desktop cisco layer 3 switch and then doing a bridged connection to that NIC. I didn’t think this would work as intended though with multiple VMs linked to that one bridge port. Now however I see you can buy multiport NICs so I think if I bridged each VM to its own NIC port and linked those to their own ports on the switch I could accomplish what I want to do?