Big decision - next Home Assistant install type

Installation Home Assistant OS
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I’ve been running Home Assistant in an unsupervised (Ubuntu and container) model since 2018. The laptop I installed it on might be going soon. I’m wondering what everyone’s thoughts are these days on the best way to go with my next install.

Back in 2018, I started on a Raspberry Pi. I moved away because for whatever reason, it was underpowered for what I was doing.

I don’t think my setup is difficult at all. I have a ton of Zigbee devices - mostly lightbulbs. Hue, which I moved from the hub and moved to the Conbee stick. I also have some Sengled bulbs, which I also pair directly with the Conbee stick.

Most of my automation is light bulbs, switches, and sensors. I use NodeRed for all – a lot – of my automation and couldn’t imagine automation without it. It just works so well.

Just thought to mention, I have an Unraid server which runs some of my usenet stuff and AdGuard – kind of overkill. There is a container in Unraid for Home Assistant, but I’m wondering is that similar to the unsupported, unsupervised install? Also, what would be the challenges with USB devices like the Conbee? I’ve seen some folks create VMs in Unraid – seems counter to the value of containers.

Back in 2018, there wasn’t a Pi4 and I had considered going the NUC route, but I had a spare laptop that I could dedicate and decided it was easier.

So what is everyone’s thoughts? Would love to hear from those who have done several types of installs and settled on one that works the best.

Thanks!

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I have been running a Pi 4 since 2019 (Supervised than switched to HAOS). No issues at all and I’m very happy. But I would consider going with a NUC today if I had to upgrade/change because they seem to be a better value (price, performance, availability, etc.).

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I run HAOS Bare Metal on an Intel NUC i3. It’s been running for years without a reboot necessary.

Any micro-PC will blow the dust from any Pi, and buying used on eBay for about half the cost of a new Pi5, case and power supply.

Advantages of HAOS on bare metal.

  1. Flash the HAOS image to the boot drive.
  2. Reboot.
    That’s it. Done.
    No learning curve for Proxmox, Docker, VM’s. No USB or Network issue. No managing disk or memory allocations.

The downside of bare metal? Your Home Assistant host PC is just that. Dedicated to one task. It just works."

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There are three main options, and all/none are “best”, depending on you:

  1. Docker - if you rock Docker anyway, why would you do anything else?
  2. HAOS on bare metal - keep it simple
  3. HAOS in a VM (eg Proxmox) - make it easy to revert

Supervised should be avoided.

Everything will work with any of those three methods. USB devices are easy to pass through to containers.

Well, the unsupervised install is supported just fine. The Unraid container store may lag on updates - some of those “stores” don’t get updated quickly.

I’d suggest that if you’re happy with what you’ve got there’s no real need to change it. If you’re not happy then look at HAOS in a VM.

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I’ve been running HAOS in a Proxmox VM on a Beelink Mini S12 for a year now and am very happy with the setup. I know others run HAOS on this hardware bare metal if you don’t want the Proxmox layer.

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Would you say this should apply to if I was running Home Assistant via Unraid?

I’m thinking about getting a box with more power – well two for back up – and spinning up Home Assistant as a VM.

Good point - I’m happy with it, but I want to move it away from living on Ubuntu and potentially run it in Unraid as a VM.

I’m a big fan of Unraid

I don’t mind the Proxmox layer. It sounds easier than the Supervised install I’m running now. I may just run it in Unraid, which I really like and where I run a bunch of other docker containers. Thinking of getting a bigger box, or two for redundancy and running HASOS as a VM in Unraid

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Thanks everyone for the help, thoughts and feedback!

I did more research and ended up going with:

  • Lenovo M910q Tiny
  • i7-7700T
  • 16GB RAM
  • 256GB M.2 NVME

Here is the fun part – that laptop I mentioned that was about to go? It went shortly after this post. So I lost a lot of automation in the home. I received the new machine by then, and I did have a good HA backup, but I decided to use the weekend to have fun and go with a fresh start. I knew that trying to restore from 8 years of HA config debt would likely be more challenging than starting from scratch. If anything, I could import from backup and sort out all the defects and ugly.

I used this excellent guide I found here on the forums: Home Assistant: Proxmox VE 8.3 Quick Start Guide. I was up and running in less than an hour or so. It’s nice to have the ability to take a full backup of the VM before making any system updates or changes which could be breaking or hard to reverse and end up causing more defect or random unused configs and modules. I still have some learning to do here. My biggest gaps right now are disk sizing for growth and the real value of the update/community scripts and if there is a need to keep them updated.

Since then I’ve been rebuilding my entire HA environment and just wow! The shedding of 8 years of legacy HA (which was how I learned this all) and rebuilding from scratch is so much fun and actually made me realize how much I know, which was cool. I’m doing things much more cleanly now. I’ve learned enough to avoid creating defective and random configurations leaving a messy environment which is what I’ve dealt with during my 8 years of learning. But it’s how I learned and this was a nice have this chance to clean and do things so much more efficiently.

I had also been running ZHA before using the Conbee stick. I have a lot of light, motion, sensor and time of day automations. When the Sky Connect ZBT-1 came out, I picked one up and put it away. Since Zigbee2MQTT has matured since I looked at it, I decided I was going to give it a shot. I’m again - blown away! This has made rebuilding my Zigbee network so simple and this Sky Connect is very slick and works extremely well. I don’t know how, but I have Zigbee coverage in what was previously tough areas. Same lights, just Zigbee2MQTT and the Sky Connect are the only different devices.

And pulling this all together is the beloved NodeRed. I have some Z-Wave as well, Hue, Sengled, and Xiaomi devices. This is actually where most my reconfiguration time is going. I am importing each flow and modifying and making it more efficient at the same time. Also having fun learning and testing MQTT actions in NodeRed - which is new to me!

I know this was way too much information to say “thanks.” But hopefully someone finds this thread helpful.

All in all — I have such a high appreciation for HomeAssistant. It’s a remarkable platform with such an amazing community of support!

Thanks for the help!

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If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you support the project by signing up for Nabucasa! I’m glad I did so one year ago and I’m loving how simple is to access my instance when out and about! cheers on your good vibes!