Redoing all my home networking
I've found that the home lab is a great place for cast-off corporate equipment either bought from ebay or scrounged from data center upgrades. Mine, assembled at little to no cost, consists of:42u IBM-branded cabinetCisco ASA 5510 firewallDell R610 running ESXiOld Dell 2950 full of 2TB drives running FreeNASCisco 'Small Business' 50 port managed switchA couple of 4U server cases containing the guts of obsolete gaming systems, repurposed as assorted serversIf you've got the space and can deal with the noise, I can't say too many good things about the R610s - available dirt cheap, and though they're about four generations old at this point, still perform decently since Intel/AMD have, until recently, pretty much stagnated on CPU performance.Luckily I have a basement.