I have some experience with Ceph, both for work, and with homelab-y stuff. First, bear in mind that Ceph is a distributed storage system - so the idea is that

I have some experience with Ceph, both for work, and with homelab-y stuff. First, bear in mind that Ceph is a distributed storage system - so the idea is that you will have multiple nodes. For learning, you can definitely virtualise it all on a single box - but you'll have a better time with discrete physical machines. Also, Ceph does prefer physical access to disks (similar to ZFS). And you do need decent networking connectivity - I think that's the main thing people think of, when they think of high hardware requirements for Ceph. Ideally 10Gbe at the minimum - although more if you want higher performance - there can be a lot of network traffic, particularly with things like backfill. (25Gbps if you can find that gear cheap for homelab - 50Gbps is a technological dead-end. 100Gbps works well). But honestly, for a homelab, a cheap mini PC or NUC with 10Gbe will work fine, and you should get acceptable performance, and it'll be good for learning. You can install Ceph directly on bare-metal, or if you want to do the homelab k8s route, you can use Rook (https://rook.io/ https://rook.io/). Hope this helps, and good luck! Let me know if you have any other questions.