Welcome to POHO – Psycho Overkill Home Office.

You’ve heard of SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) and recently ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office). Well, my technology plant outside the day job tends to have aspects of both, and then some. So I’m calling it POHO, or Psycho Overkill Home Office.

This is the concept and focus I have to evaluate technology in the scale I’m accustomed to working with at home. Most people probably won’t bother with multiple Internet connections, enterprise networking, virtualization, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the spare bedroom or the hall closet. But I’m not most people.

Why does anyone care about POHO? Well, when your IT budget only has one comma in it, you don’t start with the largest solutions. However, you want the reliability, sustainability, ease of management, and performance of the solutions the two-commas guys use. So you can see from some of the experiences I share here, where your small to medium business can implement big-company inspirations and expectations on your company’s budget (and human power limitations as well).

This page is here to aggregate links to my POHO/Home Lab write-ups.

• Building my compact VMware server at home (the original Shuttle SH67 write-up)
• Upgrading my home VMware lab (part 1: Ivy Bridge) (wherein we upgrade the SH67 to Ivy Bridge support)
• NUC NUC (Who’s there?) VMware lab… (Introducing the Intel NUC tiny PC, which is shockingly ESXi-friendly
• A quick word on VAAI and FreeNAS/TrueNAS (for those of you plotting out storage for your lab)
• How many Internets do you need? (Load balancing and failover for multiple home connections)
• Updated Home Lab Considerations (Some additional hardware options, from newer NUC and Microserver to mini-blade environments)
• Enterprise-Class networking on the cheap for your home lab (focusing on 10 Gigabit Ethernet  but applicable to other modes as well)

Thanks to Cradlepoint (who provided me with a MBR1400 to review) and Peplink (from whom I recently won a Surf SOHO router in a Facebook contest), I plan to update “How Many Internets” soon. 

Thanks also to Synology who provided me with a DS1513+ and DX513 expansion bay storage array for the virtualization testbed.

And thanks to Cisco Small Business for providing their new SG500XG-8F8T 10-Gigabit switch, which has already replaced the rsts11 network core and will be feeding our next revision of the virtualization lab and NAS/IP SAN testing environment.

I also have thoughts brewing for a POHO wireless networking post, with several familiar enterprise networking names making an appearance.

If you’d like to help support future rsts11 POHO experiments, vendors are welcome to contact me about providing products that would be of interest, and readers are invited to shop through the Amazon affiliate links on this site, like this one:

Intel Next Unit of Computing Kit with Dual HDMI, Gigabit LAN, Core i3-3217U DC3217IYE

As always, I appreciate your readership, your comments on the blog, and your support through our affiliate links.

Disclosure: Some items written about in 2013-and-beyond POHO posts were provided at no cost to me by the vendors involved. No compensation or other consideration was received, and any opinions or observations are based purely on my experience and not external influence. But unless otherwise noted, items discussed and reviewed were acquired at retail by me personally at my own expense.