Help building a home lab for networking and pentesting training

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Hello,
In order to supplement my studying with practical experience, i am planning to build my own home virtual lab to practice more and understand how things are setup, configured, and connected together.
I have one desktop where i will be hosting the VMs (i7, 4 cores, 3.6 GHz, 16 GB ram) and one laptop that runs windows, and Kali on VM.

Objectives:

• Understand more about how the network works and how it is secured, routing, VPNs, DNS, etc... (im studying Net+ and Sec+)
• Understand more about servers and how the communication happens and how they are setup as well, (server+ is on my list)
• Understand how the firewall is setup, IDS, IPS, how they work and how to bypass them (thinking about getting pfesense since its the course i found here).
• And the ultimate goal after all is to reach a solid foundation and understanding in order to proceed with security and penetrating testing since this is eventually the skill im looking for in the end. (testing nmap, playing with the configurations and seeing how the network gets affected and how it can be exploited, etc. )

I need help with:

• What should i install? i was thinking about MS server 2016, ubuntu server, and pfsense, is that enough? should i install anything else? should i install windows/linux os to practice as well? is packettracer beneficial in my case?
  i have seen some articles recommending vulnerable linux distros to practice pentesting, but first i prefer to brush up my foundational skills, and then will build a lab with mainly a pentesting focus.
• How to setup the network? (this is where i need help the most), how do i divide the network? and what settings should i use for the VMs? i want it to be similar to a real network, as if they are real servers and computers out there that i am communicating with and trying to do some pentesting on... so maybe an internal network is not the right option right? any detailed and beginner oriented feedback in this specific point would be highly appreciated.

That's it for now i guess, if you have any additional idea that might improve my experience furthermore, please feel free to say it. my knowledge is till limited so that's what i can think of currently.

Thanks a lot

Greetings @EA89

Looks like you've got a pretty good system to get a decent VM lab rocking. I would just build a few VMs that allow you to experiment with the concepts you're learning.

I usually keep a Win7 box, a Win10 box, a Win2012 server, and a Win2016 server laying around for messing with. I would also set one of the servers up as a Domain Controller and AD join one of the Desktops.

Then grab a purposefully vulnerable linux distro like Metasploitable2 so that you can fiddle with some of the linux based concepts/tools/etc .

That should give you a pretty good lab environment to mess around with and shouldn't take you too much time to set up.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Daniel

You can take the PEH course (TCM Academy) and Heath Adams will explain how to set up a own lab with download links and so on. At the moment, his first course is free code: FREELEARN
Alternatively (if the code is not valid anymore) you can watch The cyber mentors zero-to-hero course or see his AD set up videos.

You can add things like this for a pentesting lab (a bit advanced stuff):

and read this article:
https://www.ivoidwarranties.tech/posts/pentesting-tuts/pivoting/meterpreter/

I found a refurbished HP DL320e Gen8 Intel dual 6 core Xeon server with 15 Month Carepaq for $1200. It had a SAS RAID controller, quad gigabit NICs. I added 7200 RPM SAS drives. Next month upgrading it to 4 x 3 TB RAID 10 array for 6 TB. I added RAM to 96GB. I setup each NIC on its on IPv4 and IPv6 subnet. I added a Fortinet 60E firewall with UTM security and 221-C Access Point. I have two WAN and 8 LAN ports on it. I set separate networks for routing and so I could place VMs in separate networks. You can find refurbished Cisco routers and L3 switches too.

Here's a blog post from Vartai Security on building out an Active Directory for pentesting practice.

https://medium.com/vartai-security/lab-building-guide-virtual-active-directory-d900dc68dbed