Migration to Home Assistant Supervised: Yea or Nay?

Installation
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently considering migrating from Home Assistant (the old Hassio) to HOme Assistant Supervised on my Intel Nuc, and am looking for opinions / advice on (1) whether this is a good idea and (2) the best process to do so.

It’s kind of a long story, so I’ll hide some of it in “Detailed” sections for those wanting more info.
(Click on the arrow to expand a section)

My current setup is Home Assistant on ESXi together with some other VM's

So, on my i7 nuc I have ESXi running. On this I have four VM’s:

  • Home Assistant
  • Debian with ZoneMinder
  • Win10 with several installer/manager tools for my home
  • A 3CX pbx which I am phasing out.

Initially I had more, for experimenting and such, but as my setup has become more stable I find I don’t need these anymore.

My home automation setup is quite extensive, and I feel I'm not getting the most out of my nuc.

I have a lot of devices connected to / controlled by my NUC, over LAN and USB. To give you an idea: KNX, 2xOpenThermGW, Comfocontrol, Unifi network, RFXTRX, deconz, Modbus Gateways, …
Now with my current setup I litterally split my nuc up into parts. For one this can’t be ideal for perfomance and secondly, I have to manage the different VM’s separately.

So the idea is to put everything on Debian with a single VM for running Win10 when needed

So I was thinking to migrate my Home Assistant to a Supervised installation on Debian running on the “bare metal” of the Nuc. On this install I would also run Zoneminder. As said, I will be removing the PBX and I could run the Win10 computer when I need it in VMWare player.

And here comes the first question: with this information & your experience, do you think this is a good idea?

Now, the plan for the migration is as follows:

  1. Make a snapshot of my current Home Assistant setup.
  2. Install this on a “fresh” RPI4 to keep my house running while I shut down the vm.
  3. Migrate the Win10 computer to VMWare Player
  4. Completely cleanup the Nuc and install Debian.
  5. Install Home Assistant Supervised and ZoneMinder (have to think about what ports to run the services on I think)
  6. Install VMWare Player and move over the VM of my Win 10 PC.
  7. Sit back and enjoy :slight_smile:

And now the second question: does this make sense?

Some caveats/questions I already am aware of:

  • I will have to re-setup my ZoneMinder and will lose all video I have recorded; I have no problem with that.
  • I have to limit the amount of experimenting I do on the system as this is an all-in-one solution.
  • Not sure with how this will work running multiple webservices on the single PC on (I suppose) 1 IP. Maybe I can give them different ports.
  • Probably VMWare Player is not the best virtualization solution for my Win10, but I am looking for something which will easily let me convert my ESXi image to a VM which can be run on top of Debian.

Any thoughts you guys might have on this topic are welcome!

Thanks,

Thomas

2

Of course, each of us is making choices based on his knowledge, possibilities, time availability and so on.
Now that I said that, putting all my eggs in one basket this way, it not a good idea to me.

You will loose all the flexibility that ESXi is offering. I am using proxmox, but, conceptually it is the same thing. I have VMs, LXC containers and I absolutely love the flexibility this gaves me.

So, as you are asking for opinion, this would be a clear no go for me :wink:

I guess others, not big fans of virtualisation, will tell you it is a good idea to do it.

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