Brief
I want to gain experience of creating and managing an enterprise level IT network. So far I have studied and gained CompTIA A+, N+ and am in the process of getting my S+ but apart from managing the LAN at home I have no experience of commercial networks and IT infrastructure.
I am not interested in the cost and hassle of buying and setting up old/legacy networking equipment that has been discarded by enterprise. Surely a very inefficient way of learning in this day and age.
So the decision moving forward comes down to new modern workstation capable of virtualising an enterprise network set up or moving to a cloud environment.
Options
- A virtualisation workstation for my home office and building VMs and virtual networks. Although this is appealing in that it’s always nice to buy new equipment and it’s something tangible and lasting to show for the money spent, is it really the best option?
- Wouldn’t it be wiser to do all of this in the cloud? For a start it would create much less of an impact on my energy bills. On top of that it would be cheaper in the short term and most importantly it will give valuable experience in the cloud.
Cost
Virtualisation Workstation – with 150w power draw @35p per kWh
- Intel Core i9 – £350
- Motherboard – £175
- Ram (64GB) – £185
- Case – £120
- PSU (650W) – £120
- SSD (M.2 2TB) – £220
- Liquid cooler – £120
- Windows 11 – £120
- Total – £1410
Cloud – usage per day – 1p per VM per hr. Enterprise set up ~ 7p per hr. Maybe 50p per day, £2.50 a week, £10 per month. £120 per year. (This is a very generous provision of cloud compute. An instance on Linode can be $0.05 per hour.)
- Thin Client – £300 A new thin client would make sense in that it would be far more energy efficient and it would run Windows 11. (This option can be taken up at any time).
- Power draw from a device like this is a fraction of a workstation. This is very hard to assess accurately but an Intel i9 will be using around 250W when it’s operating 5 or more VMs. A thin client could be using 20 to 30W as it’s only controlling and monitoring the cloud VMs. At 5 hours a day and 5 days a week that compares as 37.5 kWh to 187.5 kWh for the whole year.
- At current UK prices that is £13 compared with £100.
So roughly speaking you are looking at 10 years of VM usage compared with buying a workstation.
Pros and Cons
| Physical | Virtual | ||
| Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons |
| Will last for a long time | High initial cost | Experience in Cloud | Nothing to show for it at the end of the day |
| Nice thing to have | High energy usage | Much cheaper in the long run | No modern PC for everyday usage |
| Modern PC for all work | Noisy? | Can be accessed anywhere/device | Overspend possible |
| Experience in building | Impact on environment | On demand, elastic. | Supporting huge corporation. (Linode?) |
| Experience in using | Stuck with config once bought | Low impact on environment | Requires decent connection |
| Clearly the way of the future | Not as direct and ‘snappy’ as physical system | ||
| Will ‘last’ forever | Cost of modern thin client |
Conclusion
While both options are appealing the deciding factors in favour of the cloud are manifold:
- Cheaper
- Far more flexible
- Experience in the future of IT
- The workstation option can always be taken up if the cloud isn’t working out
Expanding on the last point – I will be needing a modern Windows 11 machine in my office at some point and knowledge and experience gained from the cloud will point me in the right direction for what sort of machine that needs to be.
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