While i know that there are many posts very similar with this one, technology is advancing and now we have more options so i thought to make a new post. With this post, i am looking for some suggestions on purchasing hardware to run Home Assistant and not only. What i need to run on the computer is the following:
Home Assistant on VM (VirtualBox)
Plex Media Server
An FTP Server (FileZilla)
JellyFin
Remote Desktop
Since 2012, i run the above on an Intel NUC DC3217BY with 8GB RAM and 60GB hard drive with a couple of external drives connected to it, but being a 12 years old machine it needs replacement. For the last couple of years i am facing issues with the CPU fan which results in heating and every 6 months i open it for cleaning and new thermal paste . This model doesn’t even have a LAN port, i just use a thunderbold adapter for network. Although it is ancient, it has served me very well as it runs for 12 years 24/7 with very few stops (mostly for maintenance).
I am now looking for a new mini PC to host the above applications and because of my experience with the NUC, i trust the brand. However, there maybe more options available. I am looking into the following at the moment:
Beelink Mini S12, 16G DDR4 500G PCIe SSD but the fact that it has a celeron processor puts me off a bit.
I switched from an old laptop to the Beelink Mini S12 a couple of months ago and am quite happy with it. It is small, quiet, energy efficient, and runs HA under a VM (Proxmox in my case) with no problem. My CPU usage averages < 3%, and the CPU temp averages 98F.
Thank you for your comment! Your case scenario is different than mine as you are using proxmox. if i am informed well, this does not require an operating system and therefore, it wouldn’t allow me to run multiple servers on one machine.
For my case, i would need it to run Windows so i am able to install FileZilla, Plex, Jellyfin and Home assistant at the same time.
Plex is my main problem here. I don’t have a plex pass so the server supports only Software transcoding which is very CPU intensive. The NUC clocks higher than the Beelink but even if i get a plex pass in the future, i feel that the Iris Xe Graphics that the NUC has is better than the Intel UHD Graphics of the Beelink.
On Home Assistant, currently i assign 2GBs of RAM but when i am trying to stream a camera i believe it reaches it’s limits being a VM. Sometimes, i get random reboots on the VM. I haven’t really found the why it’s happening but i believe it’s the RAM. Therefore i am planning to assign 6GBs out of the 16 that both machines have.
Are there any other options that i haven’t mentioned yet?
Anyway I ended up solving the root cause of the problem which was the poor performance of running HASS OS under virtualbox by migrating everything to podman containers. My J3455 was struggling but in doing so I’ve reduced the CPU by 10 fold and can now even run frigate on it so forego the hardware upgrade
What I run (I stopped the jellyfin container as I don’t really use it these days)
For what it is worth, i run HA, jellyfin, mail server and more on a synology. HA in a VMM and pretty happy with it. finding a DS from last years capable running docker and VMM’s would not break your budget (i’m on ds920+)
For what it is worth, i run HA, jellyfin, mail server and more on a synology. HA in a VMM and pretty happy with it. finding a DS from last years capable running docker and VMM’s would not break your budget (i’m on ds920+)
You’re running a J4125 which is faster than my CPU and almost 3x faster than the OP’s
Personally not a fan of DS as there are cheaper alternatives but do love the ease of use so you get a point for that
It is rather the otherway around.
I feel Plex is doing better in library scanning compared to Jellyfin. The fact that it connects to Plex Servers prior to allowing access to any client gives me a sense of security. This was my first choice for many years now.
Jellyfin was installed after i got a good deal on privateinternetaccess VPN. Private Internet Access allows split tunneling (which never worked for me) and port forwarding and while the port forward works with Jellyfin, for the life of me i couldn’t make it work with Plex (same port, correct firewall settings, port forwarding on router everything the same). This is the reason i use Jellyfin, only when i stream out of home.
Maybe i just need to start with docker (i am a complete noob on docker), but that means that i won’t have the supervised version of HA which is something that scares me!
That’s why i was looking for an identical set up as i have but i also would like it to feel as an upgrade
If the media server is only supposed to work on local network(+VPN) then connecting to additional servers makes it less secure. If someone has access to your local network/vpn then them watching your movies should be the least of your worries.
If you only need “access home network when not at home” instead of “direct all traffic through vpn” then there are free alternatives that don’t even need port forwarding. I use Tailscale.
You can have 1 VM for haos and another debian/ubuntu with docker containers of jellyfin/plex/etc. and another VM for windows rdp, proxmox was made for this. I personally just run HA as a container along with my other containers without any VMs.
The media server should be able to work both on local network (for the TV client and tablets when connected locally) but also outside (when on vacation or when needed to watch a few pictures / family videos while on the go).
I don’t only need to access my network when away, i need the VPN for spoofing location, hide activity etc. What a VPN service is doing these days. PIA is good at it but i face the issue with Plex and i am not the only one. Redit is full of unresolved cases like mine and even the PIA support was not able to help me.
I have thought of the option of multiple VMs but then i will need a realy good machine to be able to perform well which will be out of budget. That leave us with docker, which gives me the creaps when i watch a video on how to install just HA.
What does superviserd do anyway ? It’s just bloatware in my honest opinion and am glad to see the back of it
Any decent container manager would do a better job, so going dockerized will be an uphill challenge if you’re not familiar with containers and things you’ll lose are the ability to upgrade HA and the addons
In my instance it was very easy to migrate the addons and I wrote an upgrade script which I can call from a card to update the homeassistant docker core image
#!/bin/bash
[ "$(id -u)" != "0" ] && echo "FAILED: This script must be run as root" 1>&2 && exit 1
if [ -e /tmp/ha-upgrading ]; then
echo "Process already running"
exit
fi
touch /tmp/ha-upgrading
# echo
# read -p "Do you want to backup and upgrade HA? " yn
# case $yn in
# [Yy]* ) echo "Proceeding";;
# * ) echo "Aborting";exit;;
# esac
# tag current image
current_image=$(podman images ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable | awk -e '{print $3}' | grep -v 'IMAGE')
podman rmi ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:old-stable
podman tag $current_image ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:old-stable
# pull new image
podman pull ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
sleep 10
# stop ha
systemctl stop homeassistant
# backup config
rsync -a /_dev/docker/homeassistant/config /_dev/docker/homeassistant/backup-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%T")/
# start ha
systemctl start homeassistant
rm /tmp/ha-upgrading
I also believe that going to docker will be a very big challenge. As you say, not only i am not familiar with containers but i am at a stage that i don’t even understand a video for beginners explaining about it. It sounds terrible but i am getting older…
In my HA setup, i am heavily dependand on custom_components. Local Tuya being the one i use the most for lights, Sonoff LAN another one for switches, Skoda Connect for the car and more. I am not sure if on the HA Container you can install HACS.
Anyway, thanks for your link on the Ren5000. Did you purchase this?
No but I was very close to pulling the trigger, I would research more thoroughly as it’s the cheapest 5700u platform I could find so there must be some faults. Also I didn’t like the fact that there are no sata ports
The safest bet are the beelink boxes but you’re paying >$100 extra for the same thing
Yeah I sympathize that going docker is going to be hard, don’t do it unless you’re looking for job in IT ! but imho is the most efficient way of running HA
Good luck fella - go for the straight forward hardware upgrade… for me a hardware upgrade would be really time consuming as I have some bespoke software running
Thanks for the support.
Based on your comparison above i see that the Ryzen 7 is quite a leap forward in terms of processing power. Then, maybe this Beelink model is better option.
It fits the budget and it can go up to 64GB RAM for later upgrades.
. This model doesn’t even have a LAN port, i just use a thunderbold adapter for network. Although it is ancient, it has served me very well as it runs for 12 years 24/7 with very few stops (mostly for maintenance).
