Editing Requirements Gathering (section)

== Introduction ==
First things first, before you even consider spending a penny on your homelab, you need to start by actually working out what it is you need your homelab for! That means what you want to do with it, both now and in the future!

Some typical questions to ask yourself first are:
* What are your physical requirements based on your lab location?
** How big can the devices physically be in that location?
** Do you have room for an actual rack (e.g. a 12 u rack or perhaps even bigger!)?
** How much noise you can put up with (lots, little, none)?
* What is your budget?
** Do you have money up front, or would you like to invest in your lab over time?
* What is your chosen / preferred hypervisor and do you plan to run multiple hypervisors either separately or nested?
** Do you actually care about what hypervisor, or do you care more about the VMs and workloads you run on top?
* How often will you use your homelab?
** Does it need to run 24/7?
** Conversely, does it need to be switched off overnight (e.g. because it's in your bedroom)?
** Does any part of it need to be highly available?
* How close to real-world do you want to be?
* Do you have a use case for 10Gbps networking?
* Do you want to be able to do any overlay networking?
* How often will you build up and tear down machines?
** How long will your machines last, and do you need to manage, secure and patch them?
** At peak, how many VMs do you need to run and what are your total resource requirements (RAM, CPU cores and storage)?
* How would you like to protect your Lab?  Backup / Replication
** Is protection purely for undo the lab session 'play' to a known good state?  Either protect the selected core Virtual Machines or full estate etc.
** Or is backup / replication a key 'learning' point for you lab?
* What kit do you already have which you can reuse, be it compute, storage or networking kit?
* How do you plan to license the lab?

More importantly, the IT industry is changing and roles are becoming more diverse; for example the "VMware admin" barely exists as a single role anymore. As such, we are all moving towards managing and working with a more diverse technology set. The era of the [http://www.cio.com/article/2378708/cio-role/so-long-it-specialist--hello-full-stack-engineer.html Full Stack Engineer] is apparently upon us! Your homelab therefore becomes a key tool in expanding your knowledge and skills across a wide range of technologies and software, or to put it far more succinctly:
* What do you want to use your homelab for?

Once you have the answers to the above questions, you are probably in a good position to consider '''[[Homelab_Categories|which category of homelab]]''' would suit you best.