Building a Security Home Lab: What to Practice and How to Set It Up
Certification questions describe scenarios you are supposed to recognize. The fastest way to recognize them is to have caused them yourself. A home lab turns "SIEM correlates logs from multiple sources" from a sentence you memorized into something you have actually configured and broken. You do not need much. Most of what follows runs on a laptop with 16 GB of RAM. The Foundation A type 2 hypervisor on your existing machine is the usual starting point — VirtualBox is free on every platform, VMware Workstation Pro is now free for personal use, and Hyper-V is included with Windows Pro. A type 1 hypervisor such as Proxmox on a spare machine is better if you have hardware to dedicate, because you can leave things running. Cloud free tiers are worth using for the cloud-specific objectives, though watch the billing alarms. Old enterprise hardware from resale markets is cheap and loud. Snapshots are the feature that matters. Take one before every change. Breaking someth...