F5 Lab practice at Home

You can virtualize an environment with 2x BigIPs (Active-Standby), 2-4 Web Servers (i.e. Django or Apache), and have your PC act as the default gateway for BigIP cluster whereas BigIP cluster is the default gateway for all web servers.

A modern PC with AMD Ryzen CPU and 32GB RAM will easily carry this. I have this build in a tiny ITX box.

Only the PC and 2x BigIP VE Lab licenses will cost you something. For Virtualization, use Hyper-V in case you prefer Windows 10. And use KVM if you use Linux. Both will be fine. Creating your isolated networks that use VLAN tagging can be a bit difficult with KVM as the Virtual Machine Manager (the best available graphical front-end) is poorly maintained and severely buggy since 2016. However, the libvirt command line is far better than anything Hyper-V/Powershell (and arguably even better than anything VMware paid solutions) have to offer. Hyper-V does not yet support NAT networking in its GUI but it's not a major drawback either (you can create NAT network for your Hyper-V VMs in Powershell).