All the responses so far are for replacing Virtualbox with another virtual environment or container…
Before you do anything else, go to Settings -> System -> Backups and make a backup tar file of Home Assistant. Copy this file to a thumb drive. If, and no matter how you reinstall Home Assistant, the tar file is what you will restore from.
One question - is this mini-PC exclusively for Home Assistant or do you run other Windows applications on it not related to Home Assistant?
If the answer is yes, then I strongly recommend running HAOS on bare metal.
I’ve got the atom running now with what little windows things I need, so I am free to go down the bare metal route. My question still stands though, is there a way of coping with problems when I’m away? Clearly I’ve got access via nabu casa but that’s no good if this server goes offline.
My Home Assistant server is HAOS bare metal on an Intel NUC in my basement. I cannot recall any time in the past few years that it shut down. (Except when a power outage lasted longer than my battery backup a couple of years ago).
If you would go down the Proxmox route (given your mini-pc has the resources for it) you could use a VPN in another container (I’m using Wireguard)
But, it all depends on what your requirements are and if you have a hardware issue while HA is running bare metal, you cannot do anything with remote control unless if you’re able to power cycle the system for those cases it might help.
OTOH, as Stephen also mentions: even running HA virtualised in my case, I didn’t need to intervene either.
So anyhow, you will always have a point of failure and it’s up to you how far you want to take it to be able to handle this when away.
True!
I can understand that someone would like to have remote control for a service/server that they are about to use and for which they don’t have any/a lot of experience with.
Strangely enough, he had Windows + VirtualBox which is the worst combo you can run a server on!
@DJI: with 8Gb RAM on that mini-pc, I would really be hesitant to run Proxmox
Thank you everyone for your thoughtful help. The plan for tomorrow is to go bare metal with the pc plugged into a smart socket. I can then power cycle it remotely if necessary.
I’d still go proxmox, because you can remotely control the VM or container.
Power cycling via the socket will not always bring the PC back up, unless you have that ability set in your bios, not all PC’s can do this, maybe yours can.
Proxmox also means you only need a single machine running as your other windows stuff can be on another VM.
I thought you might like to know I went bare metal successfully this morning. After transferring HAOS it went speedily & easily and now responds much faster. I checked & the pc does reboot HAOS on powerup. I only had to make one change to the setup as the new IP address was different.
Thank you all for such great support.
