The perfect home+business network?

[yokkals]

Howdy!

I'm hoping to nail down an ideal network setup for home and business to suit my needs. I want to set up a network at home that serves all my home devices, as well as my business. Here are my requirements:

Home network:
- Use "residential" connection from ISP
- File server for my home devices (mix of 10-15 wired/wireless devices)
- Virtualization for logical separation of home servers/workstations

Business network:
- Use "business class" connection from ISP (would need 2 lines coming into the house, 1 for residential and 1 for this business connection) with static public IPs
- Web/FTP server
- Email server
- Staging server
- Virtualization for the above servers

I would like to build 1 server for everything and have all my home and business servers be virtual, if possible. However, I'm unclear on how to actually network this stuff together. I may have 2 different modems from my ISP (not sure how it works when you get 2 separate lines from them), so would a dual/quad NIC system allow the virtual machines to access the appropriate network? E.g. something like:

Single Server:
- [virtual] Home - file sharing server
- [virtual] Home - development workstation
- [virtual] Business - email server
- [virtual] Business - web/FTP server

... where the "Home" VMs are connected to my "residential" ISP connection (and any device in my home can access them), and the "Business" VMs are connected to the "business" ISP connection (through a 2nd NIC).

My main question is: if I want to go with something like this, how can I access the "business" VMs from my home network, while restricting access the other way (business -> home)? I would like to be able to remote into each VM and control everything from one place, so things like administering both home and business VMs from a single workstation.

Hopefully I was clear in describing what I'm after -- please let me know if you need more details.

Thanks in advance!

 

[dbhosttexas]

Okay dumb question. For the cost of maintaining this dual infrastructure, why don't you just build / keep your home network as you want it, and lease a VPS from a hosting provider, and simply place the services you want in that VPS?

Web, ftp, and email can be easily hosted on the same box. However I would very much encourage you to steer clear of ftp. It's a very obsolete, and very insecure protocol. Unless of course you are just using it for anonymous ftp purposes for folks to download from you. If that is the case, why not just create a downloads directory in your http server?

 

[yokkals]

Thanks for the response! I could definitely use a VPS instead, and might end up doing that... I'm just a control freak and would like to make sure I "own" everything in my setup, if possible. Just kind of checking out my options to see if something like this is feasible.

I might try out the "free" AWS stuff for a bit to see if that would fit my needs performance-wise.

 

[yokkals]

Best answer selected by yokkals.

 

[dbhosttexas]

The VPS option, you basically "own" the virtual server. Okay you rent it, but you control it, what you don't control is the network, or the hypervisor. But then again, if you have your infrastructure in your facility, you still rent your internet connection, you lease it from your ISP...