I’ve begun thinking the same thing, about moving my hassio off my RPi. My main motivation is restart time.
So my first question is, or should I say, I am looking for confirmation that restart performance on a ‘grown-up’ machine would improve considerably (for me that would mean 90 seconds or less).
Secondly, Docker: What is the learning curve for that for someone with no Linux background?
Yes.
When I restart my Home Assistant container, it is back up and running in under 30 seconds.
I don’t know what the learning curve is for someone with no Linux background. I have been using Linux for 18+ years, so I tend to forget what it was like being new to Linux.
Personally I don’t think Docker is a very hard thing to grok. Once you try a few Docker containers out and figure out how the bind mounts work, it is super simple.
I am considering this as possible candidate:
Mint box mini pro
not as powerful as a NUC (or at least not as top end model) but very cheap in terms of power usage with good performance.
What do you think?
That looks like a great option for Home Assistant
I would suggest considering the fact that many users graduate from a raspberry pi to an Intel NUC. I get the feeling that there is a growing group of us. So, similar to having a Pi, when you run into issues, you have a large group of fellow users to ask for advice. I wasn’t comfortable with the possibility of SD card corruption, so I’m glad I made the switch. The only thing I miss is the bluetooth tracking, but that might be developed for the NUC in the future (fingers crossed).
I got the low-spec Celeron-powered NUC, and the performance (reboots, automations, etc) are all significantly quicker than the Pi 3b+. My reboots are around 70 seconds and I have a fairly high number of integrated devices (cell phones, chromecasts, google homes, z-wave switches throughout, motion sensors, TVs, amplifier, thermostats, IP cameras and harmony hub). Gosh… I might have a slight additiction. 
I have moved to a Intel Nuc too, i now use my old pi for the bluetooth tracking using this excellent project.
Thank you! I’ve been eyeing that project. I might do that this weekend.
Which NUC config do you suggest to use it also to stream movies with Plex in 4K?
I was tempted by dual storage unit capable NUCs in order to build a Raid1 and have an extra safety but I found it quite expensive.
Does Hass.Io snapshots include the whole system (or at least add-one plug-ins configs)?
NUCs are very expensive IMHO. Search for XCY on aliexpress, and they are by no means the only manufacturer.
Yes put on a real pc I did 4g ram 250 hard fan less one doesn’t go over 5% only time I reboot is when I update
I got a NUC7CJYH barebones kit and got 8gb RAM and a 240gb ssd. I am sure it would easily stream plex 4k.
snapshots are the same as a Pi - or any hassio system. Full addon backup etc.
I am sure there are cheaper options… arent there always… but it cost me around the cost of 3 Pi3B+'s with power, case and sd-card… They are cheap in my opinion and totally fit for purpose.
I was using Hyper-V virtual machines with Ubuntu on a older machine it when I upgraded it to run Serve 2016 (just to run docker) my machine crapped out. Something about W10/2016 this hardware doesn’t like. So I just got this nuc a few days ago:
It’s fast as hell. It boots up in seconds. I was able to copy my VMs over to the NUC easily. I was going to install Docker for Windows, but I’m not going to bother for now. I can run at least 4 VMs simultaneously under Hyper-V right now, and they start up quickly. And I take lots of VM checkpoints, so if I don’t like a config change I just apply the checkpoint instead of restarting hassio and waiting.
Maybe I’ll try docker one day but for hacking around with configuration.yaml, using a VM is a far, far superior solution.
Just chiming in here. I started on a Raspberry Pi 2 and updated to a Pi 3B+ but was still disappointed with performance, particularly the restart time.
I had an old Core i5 (Gen 2) laptop that wasn’t being used so I ran that up using the Virtual Env method. That was a huge improvement, and I don’t know a lot about linux myself.
Recently I noticed there is a VM image that I decided to try, so I ran that up in Virtual Box and have been quite happy with that performance also. Most Add-ons work fine. I use SAMBA, SSH, MosQuiTTo, Node-Red and the Configurator.
Boot times from cold (not a restart) are about 70 to 90 seconds. I use a few integrations, Philips Hue, Chromecast / Google Home, ZWave, ZHA, uPnP.
A restart of the HA service takes under 30 seconds, with ZWave taking about 20 seconds longer to finish initialising.
I would never go back to a Raspberry Pi now.
I did look at the NUC as an option, but they are way too expensive and do not give me much power saving benefit over the laptop, plus the laptop has the advantage of its battery still being good so I have a kind of inbuilt UPS too.
Could you tell me how you got Samba, SSH and Zwave working? I’m having the same setup with a VM on VirtualBox (though on a NUC). I have trouble getting those components to work.
I already found the correct USB path for the Zwave usb. I also found the correct network interface for the Samba config. What other steps do I have to consider?
Thanks in advance!
I use HassIO with HassOS. The SAMBA and all other addons work exactly as they would on a Pi out of the box. ZWave and ZHA I use USB adaptors. ZWave is the AEOTEC Z-Stick 5 and I have an Elelabs USB dongle the Zigbee(ZHA). I just found the relevant USB Passthrough in the USB config section for Virtual Box and they are deteced exactly the same as on a Pi, ACM0 for tor the ZWave and USB0 for the ZHA.
In order to keep the same IP address, I did set a static IP Address via the CLI, I found some information on the Dev pages, but can’t find the link now. I’ll post when I find the information I used to set the static IP.
But out of the box, it pretty well just worked with the USB pass through.
I recently migrated my VM to an Intel i5 based Lenovo M93p because I had to repurpose the laptop, and moving the VM was completely painless. Also, I did manage to score an old MGE (now ACP) UPS that just needed a new set of batteries. Setup of the VM didn’t need changing at all.
The M93p has a 500GB SSD and 8GB RAM, so way over kill, but I plan running up several VM’s for other functionality I want.
I will most likely move the VM to ProxMox soon as this has less overhead for the host than Virtual Box.
@brendan
Seemed that my USB path changes between ACM0 and ACM1 when I restart hassio. Knowing this I got Zwave to work properly.
Samba still remains a problem. \hassio\share does not work (not found at all). I also tried \IP\share. I already gave it a fixed IP. In this case it’s asking for network credentials. I tried the ones from the Samba config, but those don’t work. I don’t know what credentials I’m supposed to use.
Even on the Pi I found sometimes the ZWave would change from 0 to 1. Make sure you never remove the Zwave adaptor from the VM and always use HassIO’s ZWave panel to add/remove devices and not the button on the ZWave stick.
The network adaptor for your VM should be setup as a Bridged adaptor and set Promiscuous to Allow All.
Not sure if the last bit is fully necessary, but it seems to give the best performance for me.
The Host will have a different IP to Hassio.
Virtual Adaptor Type works best set to one of the Intel Pro varients in my testing on this.
It’s a bit long winded as it was a live stream, but DrZz’s does a descent tutorial on this.
It’s slightly outdated as it is for a slightly older version, but the instructions should still be pretty well what you need to do.
SAMBA Addon should use the credentials you set when you install the addon. It needs them to be set or the addon does not run.
This might cause a problem compared to my setup. I’m using NAT instead of Bridged because hassio didn’t show up in my router otherwise. Therefore I couldn’t setup a fixed IP. Therefore I wasn’t able to connect to hassio at all.
I’ll try to get it working anyway on bridged mode. This might solve it all.
I used a different approach to set the static IP by setting it directly in HassOS via the CLI.
The commands were really easy. I just have to find the link I first used. I forgot to bookmark it.
I managed to get Bridged mode working by adding an other network adapter. The standard option was an Intel adapter, but I found out that I was using the Realtec one.
Some network sensors are now disconnected somehow, including some Z-wave devices. Now I need to find out how to fix these…