For your setup a better solution would be to install a hypervisor, because it provides more longer-term flexibility and does not restrict you to HA instances only. If interested let me know to give u links to my setup guides, which so far have been applied with 100% success rate.
If you run HA in a VM it provides more flexibility for backups, updates/upgrades and experimentation if this is your mantra.
Will I be able to easily use/add Zigbee USB dongles. I am trying to build a system with less POF (points of failure). But definitely, I don’t taking a look at your option.
You should be able to use from any brand which supports the Linux wireless network stack. Example most of Intel chipsets supported at Linux kernel level.
“Linux wireless network stack. Example most of Intel chipsets supported at Linux kernel level.” Please clarify. I you are referring to network connectivity, I am using the built in ethernet. The Zigbee/ZWave Dongles will be to add more hardware to my Home Automation (sensors, beacons etc)
Hi Oz - A 10th gen i7 box would be (way) too powerful to run only HA - HA is perfectly fine already on a 5th gen Celeron, after all. The hypervisor route might make more sense to maximize your use of the metal box.
Regarding USB dongles, yes. Hypervisor solutions (proxmox or virtualbox, for example, are popular ones) all have the USB passthrough feature.
Network pertains to hypervisor allowing access to USB based wireless stacks like BT, cellular, WiFi, LoRa, Zigbee, Zwave, any wireless stack.
In most cases it is only a matter of the hypervisor allowing access to USB with the VM doing the rest of the work. Other times the stack is required at hypervisor level to be virtualised. Depends. In your case you will not have difficulties to pass USB to the HAOS VM.
HAOS (the OS itself) is not designed to do heavy video stream read/write, nor file storage, nor any ai-powered NVR… HAOS is designed to be a lightweight appliance OS to run HA.
Meaning, it’s not going to work if you want to put an NVR inside HAOS (the OS).
That said, you certainly still can do run multiple things side by side, all in the same i7 metal box.
If I were you, I’d run HAOS as an VM in that metal box, and then run whatever your NVR solution as a container, also in the same metal box, but outside of the HAOS VM. I then would do a integration to tie the HA and NVR together.
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Browsing the forum, BTW, looks like frigate is popular here.
SO as everyone suggests run a hypervisor and then HAOS in a VM, plus Frigate in a VM/CT.
If you visit my blog you will see a number of articles on Proxmox (the hypervisor), Pi-hole (DHCP/DNS server plus ad-blocker), HAOS, and Tailscale if you would like to manage the hypervisor with all its VMs/CTs remotely. I suggest you also install a Windows 10/11 VM and configure it as a management station so you can remotely, through Tailscale, administer Pi-hole, HAOS, Frigate, etc). 8G RAM is border line for all the services you want to run (Proxmox, Pi-hole, HAOS, Frigate). I suggest an NVMe 2TB SSD for Frigate or larger (4TB if you will activate recording, especially 4K).