I am about a month into HA and I already feel like I am going to quickly outgrow my rPi4 that it is currently running on. I already notice lags in automations and sometimes things dont turn off or on like they should. This bugs the crap out of me. But, I have a pair dell R720s just sitting in the rack doing nothing with dual xeons and 128GB of RAM or 256GB or RAM depending on the unit.
My question is can I just install a new instance of Home Assistant OS on an SSD and then use my backup to restore everything on the new install?
Will it restore all my integrations and addons? Basically, is there any stone left unturned that this full backup will not do for me?
Aside from the obvious added power requirements as compared to a raspberry pi, this seems like a win/win because it would be more than powerful enough to run anything I throw at it and since they both use proxmox, I can simply passthrough the whole SSD drive and then have zfs snapshots and backups done separfately by proxmox backup server in addition to anything local for backups I do in home assistant and send it off to another NAS i have laying around.
I can also do high availability as well should that becaome something I want to fool with at a later date.
Any thoughts? Many thanks for any ideas and your time
I switched from Proxmox VM to an RPI4 then to a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro using the backup feature and it works flawlessy, everything is backed up, including addons.
I found the PI, as in most cases of using them, under whelming on performance and limited on hardware, the Optiplex has a spare M.2 slot that I put a Coral TPU in for Frigate, I threw in 16GB of ram, a 2TB M.2 Samsung Pro SSD and your good to run anything on it no need for network shares, just record locally, no lag, no performance drops, real gigabit lan, 6 USB 3 ports, and they also use bugger all power too, yes the PI uses less, but we are talking maybe $50 to $60 a year in power versus around $20 to $30 a year to run the PI, they are good for an experimenting and testing, but thats it, unless if you are running a smaller HA setup you will definately enjoy the more powerful hardware.
I have two of these 7040’s, I keep one offline as a backup, I regularly create a backup file and download it, so if the main machine goes all poopy in its trousers, I can fire up the spare and very quickly have my house back in operation, the back up feature is really well done.
I will probably make the move over pretty soon because I am certain that the automations are sound and the network is sound as well. I do realize the way i want to do it has an abstraction element to it from the VM running in proxmox, but this should not be an issue. If it is, then I will buy a NUC of some sort and move to that.
I have a couple of 2 TB NVME drives saying around as well so I will pop it on one of those or just use an available SSD drive as I dont think it would make much of a difference between the two for what home assistant does. I could be wrong, but if I give it 32GB of RAM that would bew plenty I would think and most everything would sit there rather than the drive.
Is it a downside that when you restart Home Assistant, you won’t have time to go get a cup of coffee; a restart will be finished by the time you get to the door. A full backup takes a minute or so, and your Node-Red deploy will take one or two seconds.
Maybe, but I have a pretty extensive list of stuff already. I will look into tracing the automations to see if there is something else that may be going on.
You’ll be happy to move it off the rPi once you have a more complex system. I did the same, moved from rPi 4B 8GB to a VMWare virtual machine and startup times plummeted to nearly instant and everything worked significantly faster. You might also consider migrating to mariaDB as that has been a big performance boost for me as well.
It was as simple as installing HA on a VM (they actually have several VM virtual disks you can just download pre-installed) and restore your backup. The biggest thing you might have to deal with is dialing in the USB ports you use for your various dongles - everything was easy for me except Bluetooth, that was (and sometimes still is on restarts) an issue.
this is excellent news for sure. i only have a zigbee and zwave dongle right now. I dont think I use bluetooth for anything although I may need to check that.
im guessing you still use vmware in some capacity even though broadcom took them over and basically rained fire and brimstone down on home labbers everywhere lol
i made the move away from vmware esxi/vcenter a few years ago and im glad I did in leiu of semi-recent events
hm… they definitely ditched esxi free edition and quite a few other items as well… i have not read up on it in the last bit as I have been more focused on getting my house to stop yelling at me along with my wife lmaoooo
based on those that still use esxi and anything above basic vmware desktop stuff, it is a bit of a fiasco and I could easily link you a dozen youtubers that could confirm and touch on those topics pretty thoroughly. Seems par for the course with broadcom as this is most definitely not their first acquisition for sure…
Just to give another positive reaction:
Some time ago I moved from RPi to a HP T630 thin client and it worked quiet easy and with no issues.
Install, restore backup, done…
The instance will have its old name when restored (basically, don’t have two on the same net at the same time)
If you manually specify a static IP address in your HA instance it will be there when the restore happens. If you reserve the IP address at your DHCP service (in your router, etc.) then the new gear will get a new IP address assigned (new Mac address, won’t use the old IP reservation) so you’ll need to down the old one, add/edit the IP address assignment to give the IP to your new gear then restore.
