New virtual networking lab!

So, long story short, I wanted to be able to play with devices such as vSwitches, firewalls, F5 LTM, etc, and over the last few years it has become more and more usual to get them as virtual machines.

My skills in virtualization and as a sysadmin are very limited, so I thougt it would also be a good idea to build my own home lab, with an esxi where I'd deploy VMs such as junos frefly, LTM VE, etc. That way hopefully I'll also learn something about virtualization with ESXi.

So far I have already bought a lenovo TS140 from amazon + an 8GB RAM module from alternate. It was not easy to find a memory, mainly because ECC + unbuffered is not cheap at all, so I only got 1 module, and probaly will get another one soon.

The other options I've checked were the HP microSrv Gen8 and the dell PowerEdge T20, but I've chosen the Lenovo mainly beacuse it is easily expandable and I've already found that what I want to achieve seems to be possible

I already have an idea of what the lab should be, and what I would like to have is:

 - vmware ESXi   
 - F5 LTM VE
 - Junos Firefly
 - Junos Space

All this products come as VMs with a trial license which terms I'll have to read carefully, just to be sure.

It should allow me to play with automation, clustering, IRB and other conecpts in a non prod enviroment. Also at some point I would like to change the standard vswitch with some sort of SDN capable vswitch that I can use to practice SDN principles, and depending on demo licensing availiability, maybe even security/IDP.

I'll try to keep a track of what I do step by step, I still can't believe I'll be able to do all this in my own house, with equipment worth less than 500€. Performance might be cr*ppy but it still amazes me that I'll be able to have all this!