A few years back, Jake Bergeron, one of Plixer’s Sr. Solutions Engineers, wrote a blog about Ubiquiti NetFlow support and how to enable it. This was one of the first things I read as I started to beef up my home lab, because consumer-grade Ubiquiti gear is going to be 3 things:
- Cost-effective
- Easy to buy
- Simple to deploy
Most routers capable of exporting NetFlow are geared toward larger network environments and they carry a price tag to match. Cheap flow collection solutions are even harder to come by, which is why I am writing/recording this walkthrough. Time to change that up!
If you are like Jon Snow
I created a YouTube playlist called Home Lab – ESXi & Edgerouter Setup with an assortment videos that walk through the prerequisites (no sense in re-creating the wheel). If you are starting from square one, this series assumes you know nothing—and if that happens to be you, just watch in order!
Watch and follow along to learn how to:
- Create a VMware account
- Turn a flash drive into a VMware ESXi boot drive
- Use that boot drive to turn a computer into an virtual host that runs ESXi
- Pause and download the free-edition of Scrutinizer
- Deploy virtual machine files on that host
- Complete the first time setup on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.
If you already have the above completed, then you are ready to follow this Scrutinizer OVF deployment guide for ESXi. Once this is complete you are ready to follow along with the below video!
Good, now can it scale?
I’ve taken 60 bucks (just a little more than I spent on video games during the Steam Summer Sale) and turned my home lab into a really powerful practice tool for hunting down threats and analyzing traffic issues. The crazy part is this thing really does scale, all the way to the Fortune 50. The issues might be a little different in the home lab:
- Netflix keeps buffering
- Tik Tok is stealing all our data
- Call of Duty just started a 100GB update
- Every device that can be streaming is doing so at all times, so my Zoom call quality is tanking
BUT these are real user issues and if that isn’t great practice then call me crazy.
I hope this helps and inspires you to check out more videos in our upcoming Video Demo Series and to try out the free version of Scrutinizer at home and in your day-to-day.