Best Practices

Hello
Could someone please advise if the best practice is to have Home Assistant on a stand alone machine or can it work on a VM. My issue is that my entities will loose connection (about one a week) with the VM hosting HA and I want to try and eliminate this and is it advised to put it onto a dedicated machine instead of a virtual machine? At one time I had HA on a RPi 3 but then the SD card became corrupt.

Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided.

VM’s where a good starting point for me to play around and learn some of the basic’s of HA. As it was easy to recover if I did something wrong. However I chose to run it on a standalone once I nailed down a working HA setup. Also My VM host machine is not 100% as I tend to use it as a playground, with reboots often. Not the best for a HaOS environment.

I bought a used Nuc from Ebay for >70usd, added sdd and ram another 50usd installed HaOS. And it been rock solid with no unexpected reboots or lockup’s.
The only time it reboots if HaOS requires a reboot from a update.

That is my experience.

I’m running on a VM (VirtualBox) without those issues.

I prefer the VM route, as it makes it extremely easy to recover.

Personally, I would try to diagnose why you have entities loosing connection.

I don’t even know what the means…

Here one more user with standalone machine.
Started with HA in Docker on a OMV server, then moved to standalone RPi4. But my setup got a bit too much for the Pi then moved to a Shutlle SFF PC with Celeron, 4GB RAM and SSD.

Just preferring the beefier processor, and restarting only if HA needs to, as my whole household runs on it.
It was a good decision :wink:

I prefer old notebooks because of the UPS function. To save the battery I use a smart socket and let HA charge and discharge it.
Your choice to use HAOS, Docker or a VM.
I love the freedom of HA Core running in a python venv.

I’ve tweaked the network a bit (Ubiquiti Edge Switches with Unifi AP’s). Completed a design layout of my environment using the Unifi design studio, added my AP’s and was able to “see” what was going on (signal wise). Changed the channels on each AP so they don’t jump over each other and found one major flaw; the newest AP didn’t have the IOT VLAN assigned (tagged) to it. Now that it’s in the same VLAN as the other AP’s, a lot of my enteritis are connecting to it as it’s signal is closer than one of the other two AP’s. Thanks to everyone for there suggestions and responses.

Hello
A further update. I’ve created a new view within the lovelace dashboard and placed a “Grid Card” on it. Inside the “Grid Card” I’ve added multiple “Buttons” with the URL / IP address of each entity; for example http://192.168.4.xx This allows me to access the Tasmota web page (for each entity) and if required, reset the entity. I’ve had to reset an entity once and it immediately was recognized by Home Assistant.