Well the topic of this post is possibly the main reason for this blog. I hate to relay on marketing or sales terms and prefer it to proof things and test myself before i give advise on something new to a customer.
My managers always had a hard time because i requested new hard- and software all the time. I think it is so important to test, to proof and engineer new solutions. To understand how things work and lets be honest, to play! I draw a large part of my motivation from this.
I have to admit, I can be quite exhausting when something is important to me. And so, little by little, a lot of equipment came together. In the beginning, I kept everything in a closet in our office. The downside was that it took an incredible amount of time to build everything from scratch every time.
Due to laziness and time constraints, components kept getting stuck on the table between me and my colleague. And although it was actually clear that the basic services like dns, dhcp or even user directories could always be identical, nobody knew what was configured where.
In order to eliminate the chaos but to remain just as flexible, a new solution had to be found! That was the hour of birth of the „office lab rack“. Instead of using the entire surface of the table, we started building upwards.
At the beginning it was dominated by access points and with the housing of an Allied Telesis switch as an empty floor for a Juniper SRX-100 firewall. At that time, however, the centerpiece was an Intel NUC with VMware ESXi for a handful of virtual machines.
Over time, we have expanded and optimized the rack and discovered an additional benefit. Because a complete mini-infrastructure was „compactly“ in this rack, we used it for demos from now on.
What are the demo and test cases?
Well phantasie sets the limit, just to name a few:
- controller based and controllerless wireless lan
- dynamic segmentation / colorless ports
- cloud and on-prem network management
- network policy management (Aruba ClearPass)
- network automation and integration (Aruba ClearsPass, PaloAlto Networks firewall, MS Teams, Slack)
What is in it?
- PaloAlto Networks Firewall PA-220
- HPE Aruba Switch 2930F 8G PoE+
- Juniper EX-2200C
- HPE Aruba Controller 7005
- HPE Aruba Unified Access Point(Model ändert sich mit den jeweils aktuellen Generationen)
- Intel NUC
- HPE Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager (Virtual Appliance)
- Windows Server 2016 (AD, DHCP, DNS)
- HPE Aruba Airwave Management Platform (Virtual Appliance)
- HPE Aruba Virtual Mobility Conductor (Virtual Appliance)
- HPE Aruba Virtual Mobility Controller (Virtual Appliance)
- Philips Hue Bridge
- Philips Hue Bloom/Light-Strip
How went it on?
At the turn of the year I changed employer. Aside from the components, which are my private property, the rack has stayed in place with my old employer. So something new had to be found for me!
For me, a new requirement had emerged over time: the whole thing had to be better and, above all, be transportable as a single person!
I went through a long research and finally found a 4U 19inch trolley(1SKB-iSF4U) in a dj equipment store. It took me some time to fit everything in to just 4U but aside from the juniper switch, everything found a place.
Well finally i can carry my lab around. Within 20 minutes everything is up an running. The prerequesites are a power source and a network uplink to use it at the home office, the office or a customer site. This is especially useful in this covid time.
