Building a ServiceNow ITOM Homelab with XCP-NG

Summary

For anyone interested in ServiceNow ITOM, there’s no better way to learn than on your own infrastructure that you can tear down and rebuild as needed. This necessitates a “homelab.” While AWS free tier is an option, it’s limited and can get expensive beyond the basics. To delve deeper into homelab building, visit https://reddit.com/r/homelab for abundant resources.

Homelab Components

To get started you’ll need a PDI and some hardware/software.

ServiceNow PDI

To begin, you’ll need a PDI (Personal Development Instance). Fortunately, these are free, and currently, you can install Discovery and connect a MID Server to your PDI.

Hardware

Choose a Mini-PC suitable for running as a headless server and install XCP-ng on it. I am a fan of Intel NUC series machines, however other options exist. XCP-ng boasts excellent hardware support, making it compatible with most devices.

Hypervisor

XCP-ng is a free and open-source hypervisor, allowing you to run multiple virtual machines for diverse learning and testing purposes. While it may pose a challenge for beginners, comprehensive tutorials and a growing XCP-ng community offer substantial support. Start with the official documentation and join the XCP-ng community for help.

An added advantage is the ability to perform discovery against your XCP-ng host(s) using the Citrix Xen HyperV Pattern to identify all your VMs. Refer to ServiceNow Documentation for details.

MID Server

Once your Hypervisor is operational, the first VM to create should be a Windows VM to function as your MID Server. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Windows Discovery cannot run from a Linux MID Server, so you will probably need a Window host. Refer to my MID Server automated install script for assistance.

Automation

Explore Ansible, Packer, and Terraform. While it’s not a one-day task, once implemented, you can fully automate and deconstruct your setups. For instance, I utilize Packer/Terraform to swiftly build new Linux/Windows VMs and dismantle them even faster. Some examples are available in a repo here and here. With Ansible, you can automate the installation of applications such as IIS, Wordpress, Docker, Kubernetes, etc., followed by running discovery on those applications!