I am fairly new to home assistant, I’ve only done some basic local machine tinkering, but now I am looking into the possibilities to embrace it into my home. After watching many video’s and reading a lot of articles I decided to run my whole setup on docker. I found out that newer NAS devices as for example from Synology support docker (I have no NAS at the moment so the network storage also comes in handy). I’ve been looking at this model: https://www.synology.com/nl-nl/products/DS218+ I am just not really sure how wel a model like this can handle the load all of the docker containers.
Some of the containers I want to run:
Node-red
Grafana
Home-assistant (duh)
Influxdb
Ubiquiti UniFi Controller
Ubiquiti UniFi Video Controller
Portainer
…
I am really not sure what kind of hardware is required to run such setup. I found following post: My Docker Stack where @flamingm0e runs something much stronger.
Also if I bought the NUC, how would you integrate network storage as provided by a NAS? All help is appreciated.
I am hosting my HA on a pretty old Synology the DS1511+ which has an old Atom D525 CPU.
You can see the performance difference here
I am not running all of the above but I am runnin HA, PI-Hole, DS-Video, Surveillance Station with 3 cameras, server Hi Bitrate Audio etc.
If you can afford try and at least buy a 4 bay one, then you can run RAID 5 have have data redundancy in case you loose a HDD.
If you want to build your own NAS I wouldn’t get a NUC, but look for an ITX board with something like a J5005 on it. You can then have more HDD connected for redundancy.
So in your opinion running al those docker containers on the NAS wouldn’t be an issue? What about only 2 disks but running those in RAID 1? What about Synolgy vs Qnap?
I can’t see them containers being an issue, some database work and UniFi Video can’t be that dissimilar to Surveillance Station?
As an example HA uses 2.72% CPU and PI-Hole is using 6.4%
RAID 1 is very wasteful on HDD Space you loose half of your available HDD space. Whereas with RAID 5 you only loose one drive as you scale.
RAID 1 2x 4TB drives only gives you 4TB
RAID 5 3x 4TB gives you 8TB
RAID 5 4x 4TB gives you 12TB
RAID 5 5x 4TB gives you 16TB
etc
You also don’t need to fill all 4 or 5 / 8 bays etc with HDD’s when starting out. You only need 3 HDD’s to get going and expand what money lets you / you need the extra space.
I only have experience with Synology so can’t comment much on QNAP.
I think you may be able to use more cameras on their Surveillance Station equivlent without buy extra licenses, but not 100%. But as you mention UniFi Video it’s not really an issue.
I also don’t know if you can integrate in to QNAP’s API for their Surveillance Station like you can on Synology.
It might be worth looking for a previous generation Synology as well. Although there isn’t a massive price difference between a 2 bay and 4 bay NAS.
Thank you so much I was really worried about the CPU usage but that doesn’t seem to be an issue, even on your older model. What about RAM usage? I suppose also not a bottleneck?
RAM is ok. I have 5GB of RAM in mine. It’s also cheap to upgrade, they tend to use Laptop type SO-DIMM’s
HA is 280MB and PI-Hole is 840MB both in docker containers. System is about 58MB! I am not streaming anything at the min and Surveillance Station is just chilling in the background as there are no Camera activity’s.
If you wanted to use something like Machinebox for Face or Number plate recognition I don’t know how that affects CPU / RAM usage.
Raid5 is getting into dangerous territory with the size of disks these days. The stress put on the remaining disks in the array during a rebuild after replacing a failed disk is pretty substantial, and with multi terabyte disks, the risk of killing another disk during a rebuild is pretty high. The minimum I recommend is a RAID6 if your disks are over 2TB
@flamingm0e What do you recommend, getting a NUC (and running everything in docker) or running the whole setup in the NAS docker environment? At the moment we don’t use much storage at home, but I was thinking that it could come in handy when video surveillance was rolled out here.
@flamingm0e
I am stuck with RAID 5 at the moment as I have no free bays left.
I know RAID 6 is safer as you have two redundant drives. I could probably just about back everything up onto an external drive with a Data purge of junk I no longer need and rebuild it all. Although I would be down to about 2TB of free space in a RAID 6 setup.
@Jdruwe
One problem with the NUC devices is limited HDD connectivity unless you went down the USB3 option.
Personally I would build my own NAS type setup if and when my Synology dies on me.
Something like a J5005 ITX board and a case like:
Or in my case a larger 8 bay as I am using all 5 of my bays up. You don’t need to fill every bay to get going.
You can even run your own Linux flavor or you can actually run Synology Environment on non Synology hardware with a bit of work if you want to easy to use interface. You can then also run VM Ware on the Synology.
In my case I use an i5 nuc with one m.2 disk and one ssd. But the nuc is dedicated to home automation and security meaning I only run HA and surrounding docker containers plus the xeoma cctv server and a traccar server. All other computer related things is kept away from the nuc
I have no nas but surveillace video is stored on the śsd. Its 1 tb and I only store videos when motion is detected.
For other storage I have a Nextcloud server set up on a vps in a data center in Germany. I also have a dropbox account
I have a NAS, a proxmox host, and several pis in the house. I decided to go with a dedicated NUC for my setup. I can do maintenance on the other servers and not affect my home automation components. I prefer to have a dedicated device for that.
Don’t treat the NUC like a NAS. Treat it like an appliance that only does home automation.
Are out of date, or at least for some models.
Synology now supports Python 3.5.6-8 so you should be able to follow the normal instructions.
But I find it convenient to leave my install in the Docker Container.
On newer models you can also use the Virtual Machine Manager
So you should be able to run the VM version of HASSIO?
I was really worried about the CPU usage but that doesn’t seem to be an issue, even on your older model. What about RAM usage? I suppose also not a bottleneck?