You might have realized by now that building a lab isn't as simple as you might think. For those who are interested in how I built the lab that I used during the writing of this book, you can follow this detailed guide.

I chose to rent a dedicated server from OVH. This was for the following reasons:

• For my on-site training, I needed a lot of resources (256 GB of RAM or more)
• I did not need to run the server all the time
• I did not want to pay any setup fees
• I needed to be able to order as many public IP addresses as necessary for the project
• There were months when I didn't need to run the lab at all
• There were other months in which I needed a different hardware platform with different resources
• I needed to access the lab from anywhere

Based on these requirements, I decided that it did not make sense to use my hardware because the costs would have been too high. The cloud solution did not work for me either, because I needed to have complete access to the environment and I needed to be able to tweak it as much as necessary.

Let's take a look at the architecture of my lab and its logical design.