Looking for advice: Home Assistant + other things on Nuc-like box

Hi friends, looking for advice and input. I’m currently running Home Assistant on a Pi3, but it’s getting slower all the time and I’m about to pull the trigger on a cheap used mini PC. Here’s my current thought process, any and all comments/suggestions welcome:

PC I’m looking at:

AMD A8 PRO-7600B
256GB SSD
8 GB DDR3 RAM

I really like the ability to use Home Assistant addons. While I have the technical know-how to mess around with docker containers for addons, I mostly just don’t want to and would rather run with something supervised.

Things I want to have on this machine (possibly more in the future):
Home Assistant, with a bunch of addons I currently use
OpenVPN or similar
NextCloud or similar

Installation options I’ve thought about:

  • Ubuntu/Debian with docker running Home Assistant Supervised: I like the idea of using docker, but don’t love the questionable future support of this method.
  • Portainer with HA as a VM: There seems to be a bunch of people recommending this as a solution, but I’m not super excited about it, mostly because of how VMs assign resources.

One solution I just came across is running the HA OS on the PC itself, and using the Portainer addon for dockers running OpenVPN/NextCloud/any future things I might want to do. Would this be a good/bad solution? Why or why not?

I’m open to other solutions as well, mostly looking for a good mix of future flexibility with ease of use.

My Odroid HC2 died today. So I’m also looking at a replacement. Think I’ll take the step to a NUC.

I also have this question:

One solution I just came across is running the HA OS on the PC itself, and using the Portainer addon for dockers running OpenVPN/NextCloud/any future things I might want to do. Would this be a good/bad solution? Why or why not?

Anyone able to elaborate on this?
I’d like to run nextcloudpi on the HA OS (probably the route to take is via Portainer). I don’t know if this is advisable.

So I realized after the fact that buying a non-NUC PC was a bit of a dumb move on my part, since the NUC image doesn’t work. So if I ever upgrade again in the future I’ll make sure to get a proper NUC. However, what I did end up doing was putting Proxmox on my mini PC with Home Assistant in a VM. It’s been working great so far, although maybe a bit more overhead than I would have liked.

Before I settled on Proxmox I tried Ubuntu Server, and using that I was able to use the Portainer addon for Home Assistant and it seemed to work fine. I haven’t gone any further with a VPN or Cloud service yet though.

Allright, go for a proper NUC. Thanks for this tip.

My odroid also had an Ubuntu installation with home assistant on top of it. Worked for now, but I don’t know how sustainable this is, as hass os seems tot be the standard installation now.

Proxmox is an option, but I hope I don’t need to use it. It’s too complex for me.

Like you I started on a Pi3. I recently switched to running HA on Proxmox running on an old Asus MB with a AMD A6-6400K APU, 8GB RAM, 120GB HD (gonna swap to a small SSD soon) and haven’t looked back. The CPU usage for HA peaks at 20% and typically runs at 10%.

Once proxmox was installed I use the single line install for HA (see here: https://github.com/whiskerz007/proxmox_hassos_install) and it took about 5 mins from start to finish. I was a little reticent about proxmox to start with but its actually pretty simple if you dont want to do anything complex - and I dont :slight_smile:

Hope that helps, whatever you choose :slight_smile:

Been using Home Assistant since 0.2x. Three months ago I replaced a pi4 with a used Lenovo M93p Tiny PC, i5 2.9 GHz, 8 GB, 500 GB HD for $75 off eBay. Installed a 128 GB SSD for $22 (now use 500 HD for backup via Timeshift). Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS with Docker CE and the Supervised HASS installation. “Not supported” but faster and more flexible than hassos? Never breaks a sweat. Full HASS restart (459 entities) in less than one minute. Seems to me that NUCs are expensive.