Is it worth building a test environment at home when you can just do it in “the cloud” now?  I think it depends on what you want to learn.  My goal for the latest home lab started with these lofty goals:

• Create a Microsoft AD environment from scratch
• Actually setup DNS successfully
• Configure NAT
• Setup a VPN into the NAT network
• Scale this deployment to “the cloud”

I broke it down into these steps (each one will hopefully be a separate post):

Hardware and network setup

Domain controller setup

DNS, DHCP setup

RRAS setup

VPN setup