This article is all about finding virtualization personal project. If you’re looking for a job in IT and someone asks you what you’re up to or what you’re working on, your answer should never be nothing.
In this personal project ideas series, I’ll give a few ideas for projects you can use to become familiar with specific IT items.
I’ve written about this several times but the first public article I wrote was nearly 10 years ago (the date on the post may be the imported date). It was about checking your computer to see if it can run virtual machines.
Virtualization was huge when it became mainstream and it’s only grown from there. Take advantage of it to learn a few things, not just with virtualization either.
Table of Contents
Looking at Hypervisors
- Hyper-V Server 2019 Evaluation at Microsoft Technet Eval Center. You don’t need the server to user Hyper-V. You can use Windows 10 as well. Try both.
- VMware Workstation Player 15 at VMware. This isn’t limited to the workstation player, you can also play with vSphere as well.
- VirtualBox by Oracle.
This is a decent primer to get started with VirtualBox:
What to Use a Virtual Machine For
- Safely learn programming languages like Python and Powershell.
- Safely test software installations or found scripts online.
- House one or multiple versions of Windows.
- House one or multiple versions of Linux.
- Learn security with Kali Linux.
- Learn Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, FTP, and more by creating a mini home lab.
Examples of What to Put in the Virtual Machine
Windows Of Course
- Get started with a free Microsoft OS from Microsoft Developers
- Claim your free year of Azure to use Server OS
Any Base Flavor of Linux
You can load these ISOs as CD drives in your hypervisor.
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Linux Mint
- Elementary OS (best looking by far)
- Arch Linux (if you’re feeling bold)
Personal Cloud Projects
Web
- Setup Apache (or better yet NGINX), MySQL, and PHP.
- Create a headless web hosting environment with Ubuntu Server.
- Create a web hosting environment with CentOS.
- Understand caching with Varnish HTTP Cache.
Other
This section was updated 6/2/19.
- Play with vsftpd for an amazingly secure and fast FTP server.
- Play with Postfix for a personal mail server.
- Setup a personal mail environment with Cyrus IMAP.
- Play with Docker for a way to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers.
- Check out the Docker Overview at their Docs page.
- You can directly try Docker by going to the Play With Docker Classroom page.
Docker was listed last here, but it’s certainly not the least valuable offering. My local web prototyping and deployment software uses Docker so I can vouch for how neat and effective this solution is.
If you don’t want to check out those links above, at least check out this intro video from Twitter University:
Conclusion
I’ve learned quite a bit by starting a virtualization personal project or should I say, multiple projects installed on my host and a server I created.
What are some things you’re interested in that I haven’t listed here?
