I'm an undergraduate looking for ways to experiment with network security techniques on my residential local area network, so much of this is going to be very new to me. Forgive me in advance for asking a question that might be obvious to others. My intention is to run two devices -- a RPi running Kali Linux and another device running Metasploitable.
I have a separate box running Kali because I want to be able to run tools from a network I control rather than running them from the university's network, which understandably frowns on the use of penetration testing tools. I ssh into this box from the university and use it to interact with wargaming servers.
I would like to set up my own Metasploitable server to attack because I have peers that I work with (we're all learning these things together) and I would like us all to practice running these tools together (and give them a legitimate target to operate against) and it gives me a chance to learn network hardening techniques against live opponents.
My issue, naturally, is with putting an intentionally unsecure box on the network. The logs in the Kali RPi are filled with brute force attacks, and putting a metasploitable box on the network seems like an invitation to disaster if I can't partition the server away from things like my NAS (which is mostly filled with a terabyte of family photos).
This device: http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Systems-Wireless-Security-RV215WAK9NA/dp/B00AHSNQNS appears ready to set up a VLAN. I don't know a whole lot about VLAN (as I've said, I'm a student), but it seems to me that a VLAN is just the sort of thing I need. Is my instinct here correct, or would there be an unacceptable level of danger (should the intentionally-vulnerable server get compromised by someone other than my colleagues) of exposure to other adjacent virtual networks?