What's this about?

Hi! I am hoping to document some exercises and experiments in scalable and distributed systems design and development in a series of posts.

My intent is to run these on my home lab, which at this point is a single machine running a simple VM setup. Since I have a decent Windows machine (i7-6700k with 4 cores and 32 gigs of RAM), I think I can manage a simple VM cluster of at least 3 VMs (we will see!). In the future, I hope to be able to set up a dedicated homelab server with more chops.

There are a few free or inexpensive options to run a VM setup like this. I am using Hyper-V since it comes built in with Windows 10 (just had to upgrade to Win10 Pro). VirtualBox, VMWare Player etc. are also good options.

Many of these posts could be trivial set up documentation, as I intend to treat them as my notes as well. But, through the process, I hope to find a few useful nuggets that I or someone else may benefit from.

Let’s see where/how far this goes. You are welcome to tag along!