Read the link I provided. Yes, Docker is required to run hassio, since hassio runs docker…
This also allows you to run other docker containers that have nothing to do with home assistant if you like.
Correct, as I stated previously.
If you read the docker page, you will see why it is not recommended to run docker on Windows.
When running Home Assistant in Docker on Windows, you may have some difficulty getting ports to map for routing (since the
--net=hostswitch actually applies to the hypervisor’s network interface). To get around this, you will need to add port proxy ipv4 rules to your local Windows machine, like so (Replacing ‘192.168.1.10’ with whatever your Windows IP is, and ‘10.0.50.2’ with whatever your Docker container’s IP is):
netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenaddress=192.168.1.10 listenport=8123 connectaddress=10.0.50.2 connectport=8123
netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 listenport=8123 connectaddress=10.0.50.2 connectport=8123
This will let you access your Home Assistant portal from http://localhost:8123, and if you forward port 8123 on your router to your machine IP, the traffic will be forwarded on through to the docker container.
There are several things that simply will not work on Docker in Windows, like passing through a USB device (Zwave/Zigbee/etc), because Hyper-V does not support such a thing.