Breakdown

Our Lab

In the process of making our project better to work on one of our first tasks was ensuring all our contributors had access to a clean workspace when they needed it. This encouraged the development of our ‘Lab’ environment that consists of the following hardware:

x2 E-2386G Xeon CPUs
64GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM
1 TB NVMe SSD

The above hardware was chosen with one important factor in mind. VM lifespan is relatively short and while high-core count and large ram capacity servers are great, we don’t have the demand for that caliber of server.

Cloud Provider

We chose to utilise ‘OVH’ for a few reasons highlighted below, yes other hosting providers can also deliver on a few of the points listed at the time of enquiring only OVH was able to deliver all of them.

Hardware - Current-gen Xeon-E CPUs
Location - London, UK
Price - Cheap IPv4 addresses & summer sale hardware deal
Software - OVH is an official Proxmox hosting partner

Software Used

This is a brief summary of the application stack we’re utilising to make the Lab environment work for our needs, most are not required but the ones that are have been highlighted with a ✔ symbol.

Required	Article	Tool	Purpose	Summary
✔	Core/Proxmox	Proxmox	Hypervisor	Proxmox was the easiest solution to get up and running without the need for ESXi hosts and enhanced Windows configuration.
✔	Core/Virtual Machines	Sophos XG	Firewall	Product familiarity and ease of use compared to other OSS products, support included with all licenses.
❌	N/A	Windows Server	Domain Controller	Utilises AD w/ AAD Sync and provides DHCP and DNS for the network.
✔	Optional/Docker	Docker	Containerisation	Containers are much lighter than running full blown VMs for every application.
✔	Optional/Docker	Portainer	Management	Management interface for Docker containers utilising M365 Auth.
❌	N/A	Nginx Proxy Manager	Reverse Proxy	NPM is a docker file ready to go purpose built for our needs.
✔	Optional/Monitoring	Uptime Kuma	Monitoring	Montior our environment and sends Discord webhooks when down.
❌	N/A	Homer	QoL	Single pane of glass for shortcuts to services.