Installed Home Assistant on MacBook - Abandoned that.
Installed and ran HASS.io on a Pi3 for a while. Not enough ram. Outgrown.
Installed and ran HASS.io in Docker on a 19" rack mount Proliant DL380 G6 Server with dual Xeon processor and 72GB Ram.
QUESTION:
Preface: My server is a public name server and I run a small hosting operation for some of my long term clients, and it’s also my home automation server, backup, LAMP, etc.
I know that a full rack mount 2U server with 12 Cores and 70+ GB Ram with a Raid controller and 8 hot swap SAS Drives is worth “nerding out” over, but in the interest of space and power consumption, is there any reason to continue forward with hardware with such a big physical footprint?
Let’s assume I’m not going to use a cloud service provider to spin up a server and I’m going to stick with having my hardware on hand. What’s the smallest form factor that you would run a full fledged server on?
I think this is totally dependent on the needs of the programs running on that server and the load the respective clients apply.
If your asking what the minimal requirements for a HomeAssistant installation are there are plenty of threads discussing what people run related to HA and add ones and the hardware they use.
I, like you, have outgrown the RPi. What I now use is an Intel NUC i5 running Ubuntu Server. Since using this setup I have had no issues with performance, even though a have a relatively large (40 + devices) Z-Wave estate.
Peter.
Not as such.
Using the Hassio Addons “NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy” and “Let’s Encrypt” to point the domain I already have, to give me external https access.
I’m running HA (as of 2 weeks ago), 6 different web sites (through Nginx Unit), public NTP (bind9), Percona DB, InfluxDB (both for HA and sites), Grafana and two Win10 virtuals (through KVM) on a Dell Optiplex 9080 (Intel i7) with 16GB ram and an internal 1TB SSD with 2 external SSDs for backup and redundancy on Ubuntu 18.04. No issues at all with this build. It’s a micro atx, but that little thing powers through like there’s no tomorrow. The only thing that I’ve had an issue with was the power supply went out once.
I just upgraded from a rPi4 as I kept running into I/O contention issues.
LOL, yeah, I’d say it’s overkill. But, when has that ever stopped us geeks?!
Regarding the NUC question, it really depends on how reliable you want things to be and how robust your internal network is. If you have a quality network, I’d say go with a good NAS all day long. If your internal network is crap (which I highly doubt in your case), then the USB3 external hanging off the NUC would be a good idea so long as you have a backup medium and plan.
So, I’m running Unifi with a single AP and an 8 Port PoE switch with pfSense as the gateway. I have a business line from Cox, so my IP is static. Most of my devices are wireless, save for the ones that I hate troubleshooting the most (printers / document scanners / 3D Printers, etc.)
My IoT devices, guest network, and home network are all separated on vlans. The only missing pieces at the moment? Storage. I need more storage.
I use Bacula in cooperation with AWS CLI to backup the important stuff…oh, and HASS.io is running on a Gigabyte mini PC (like the Intel NUC) so it’s isolated from the main server.
At the moment, upgrading the older SAS drives from 143GB X 8 to something larger seems like a waste of time and energy especially when the DL380 P62 seems to only support 600GB drives max…and I’m thinking I’d like a 20TB NAS or something of that nature.
I personally like the Synology 4 bay DS814play. I plan on getting one in the next few months as my home server is maxed out on drives (combination of external USB3 drives and internal SSDs).