I often enjoy reading what other IT Pros use for their day-to-day work and also in their lab, so thought I would include a run down of my environment here.
Cloud - Azure
I am lucky enough to have access to an MSDN Enterprise subscription through my work. This gives me £115 of Azure credits and 2x Microsoft 365 tenants which includes licences for all products (except Windows and audio conferencing, neither of which I need) for test and development work. I have a CloudGuy tenant which has the cloudguy.co.uk domain registered and an Azure hosted VM running a domain controller which syncs AD identities to Azure AD using AD Connect.
Home Lab - Server
I have the obligatory geek 'home server' buzzing away in CloudGuy HQ which I use for most of my testing and learning outside of work. It's a reltaively old Intel i5, 32GB RAM, 250GB SSD for OS, 500GB SSD for VMs and 2x 3TB RAID 1 volumes for storage. It's running Windows Server 2019 Standard and VMWare Workstation 16 for VM hosting. It also doubles up as a file server for my family's pictures, music and home movies. It's by no means the best spec server in the world, but it does just fine for my needs.
Home Lab - Workstations
Like any seasoned IT guy I have a plethora of laptops accumulated from old jobs, upgrades, eBay finds and friends who can't be bothered to dispose of their old equipment and 'gift' them to me because "you like computers, so I thought you would want this" :-)
My main workhorse is another relatively old Intel i5 desktop machine running Windows 10, 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD OS drive and 1TB HDD data drive. The machine also has a GTX 970 graphics card which, combined with my Logitech G920 steering wheel, makes an adequate F1 racing simulator for when I need to unwind after a busy week. One day I hope to build a sophisticated racing sim set up complete with a large ultrawide monitor mounted to a frame with racing seat and all the trimmings - I may cover that in a future post, so keep an eye out!