My home lab serves both my personal and work environments and is a source of fun to maintain. Its very helpful with work planning. My original VMWare server was built in 2012 using a 4 core cpu, 32g of ram and a Synology NAS (DS212J). The requirements for my current setup were finding this host somewhat restrictive, along with the fact that I would like to upgrade to a new version of Windows Server. Somewhere in the planning I decided to implement a 10g network which ultimately cost almost as much as the server upgrade.