I have HAOS installed as a VM on unRAID. I dipped my toes just to try something new, but HA has quickly become an obsession! Got the SONOFF Zigbee dongle and just muddling through with the Zooz Z-Wave dongle.
More importantly, my wife likes the simple dashboard I have setup, meaning, HA is now a part of our home environment.
My question is whether HAOS/VM/unRAID is good for stability, or would it be better as a standalone server? My unRAID server also functions as a file and media (plex) server.
A lot of the writeups talk about how to setup HA in various environment, but I don’t see anyone talking best practices.
I’d be looking at an environment for it’s stability, recoverability, ease of management, performance.
On a related topic, how easy is it to take a backup of HAOS from one platform (unRAID) and restore it in another form (on a dedicated workstation).
As long as the hardware you run it on is stable you should be fine. An added benefit of running it virtual is ease of backup, you back up the whole thing not just the folders and files. This makes restore easier. You can also do snapshots before changes so you have a quick and easy way to roll back, this is not something you get if you run it on bare metal.
In regards to resilience virtualized gives you more options as well - replication, high availability and so on, but then you can’t have USB stick connected directly in the main server. I solved this by using a network based zigbee coordinator, not sure if Z-wave ones exists. This could be more hassle to set up though and is probably not needed. As long as you store your backups outside the server you should be fine.