What is Ceph? Ceph is an open source software-defined storage system designed and built to address block, file and object storage needs for a modern homelab. Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) makes creating and managing a Hyper-Converged Ceph Cluster relatively easy for initially configuring and setting it up.
Why would you want a Hyper-Converged storage system like Ceph? So your PVE that runs Virtual Machines and Linux Containers has a highly available shared storage service making them portable between nodes in your cluster of machines and thus highly-available services.
There is a significant learning curve involved in understanding how the pieces of Ceph fit together which the Proxmox documentation does a decent job of helping you along. Proxmox VE sets some decent defaults for the Ceph Cluster that are good for an enterprise environment. What they do not do is help you set default to reduce wear and load on your Homelab system. This is where I am going to try out a few things to reduce load and wear on my Homelab equipment while maintaining a relatively high-availability environment.
My post on Ceph Cluster rebalance issue from earlier was from figuring out issues in an unbalanced cluster from a strange data loaded into a cluster. This post is focused on a regular running cluster that needs some optimization for the homelab.