Is it possible to install HA on NUC, while having the NUC act as a media server for Sonos and Android TV

Installation
1

Hi, I’m looking for some advice if possible?
I have a NUC,
“Intel core i3 10th gen 10110U 2.1ghz 2.59ghz
32Gb ram ddr4
256Gb m2 ssd
1tb ssd”,

Is it possible to install HA on it to control Philips Hue lights and accessories while also using the 1tb ssd to store music for Sonos speakers and videos to play on an Android TV.

If it is possible which of the four installations methods should I choose?
"Home Assistant offers four different installation methods. We recommend using one of the following two methods:

Home Assistant Operating System: Minimal Operating System optimized to power Home Assistant. It comes with Supervisor to manage Home Assistant Core and Add-ons. Recommended installation method.
Home Assistant Container: Standalone container-based installation of Home Assistant Core (e.g., Docker).

There are two alternative installation methods available for experienced users. We generally do not recommend using these, unless you have extensive Linux knowledge and experience.

Home Assistant Core: Manual installation using a Python virtual environment.
Home Assistant Supervised: Manual installation of the Supervisor. The most complex of all.".

Would these files be accessible only through HA or would each device also be able to access the files without going through HA?

I’d greatly appreciate any advice and guides and links

Kind Regards

2

Easiest way would be to use proxmox.

Then have a look here and choose what ever media server suits your needs.

3

I would recommend going with the linuxserver docker image since it doesn’t recommend using privileged container, like the official one: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/homeassistant

If you have a privileged container, people who manage to break into the container essentially get root access on the host machine.

4

Thanks for the quick reply Arh.
I’ll have a look at this guide

over the weekend.
Hopefully this

might mean something to me then

5

Thanks Cyberbeni, I’ll have a read over this also.

It’s all looking quite daunting at first glances.
I might be better of just install HA with Sonos integration and worry about the other bits later once I hopefully have learnt a little.
I was hoping there might be easy option for noob but alas.

Thanks

6

My philosophy is, Keep It Simple. Don’t complicate things with containers or virtual systems. They are just something else to learn, something else to go wrong and a vector for interfacing problems.

Just get another mini-PC and run HAOS on one and Ubuntu on the other. You can buy a good used Intel NUC i3 for the cost of a new Raspberry Pi, power supply and case.

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7

Been running HA since the beginning and never ran privileged or host networking. It is not a requirement and have not seen limitation.

Linuxserver.io is nice but I’m against running third party version of software unnecessarily

8

This is the way

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9

Thank you all for your advice.
If I install HAOS directly first to get some experience can I transfer my setting, automations etc from that version to a version of HA that I might run on Proxmox or Linuxserver docker or will I need to set it all up again?

10

Yes. Pretty much copy config folder and move to next system

11

Or just do regular backups, and use one of those at onboarding screen on a new install, when changing hardware or up grading ETC.

Best bet is to sort out some sort of daily backup to google drive or nas. I use google drive.

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12

Thank you all for your replies. It’s school holidays down here and I haven’t really had a chance to look into your suggestions properly.
I shall have a bit more free time in a couple of weeks.
Cheers.

13

I would say despite a lot of people stating the promax route, I would say its not a use case for all, why home assistant uses little resources, if you add ai, frigate with 3x 4k cameras, doorbell, a couple of internal cameras, deepstack, double take and multiple dashboards home assistant os can use up a lot of resourses.

I have a 12th Gen i5-12400T, with 32gb of DDR5 and depending on how much traffic is in front of my cameras (human inside and out and cars out) cpu can get to over 70% with ai going on, it normally sits around 18 to 20% at quite times.

Memory wise the system is always using over 50% so over 16GB, the great thing about the os is it will take what it can down memory wise.

When I realised the changes (cant remember what version) I switched to OS instead of promax and vm due to this. all I was running on promax was a bunch of containers anyway which can run fine on my nas.

Do your research, think about future plans and decide whats better for your use case, all methods have their benefits. Promax or any other vm route has the benefit of instant restore from a back up, were as the OS will take a litte longer to restore this.

14

Isnt proxmox similar to VM where resources are alloted to VM?

How is OS Better to help this? I guess with OS since it is more docker oriented it will use less resources but it also limits system capability to some degree

I prefer docker as it allows flexibility and docker containers share resources which can be better for homelab.

In the end you are correct. It is all a matter of user capabilities and hardware. everything is not for everyone

15

thats the point in my use case I want all of the resources, I can create instance that can make even this system sluggish if I try.