Mini PC host for HA

Hardware
1

Hi,

I have almost 25 home smart devices and I want to have them all controlled by HA.
Beside that there are a GPON ONT ZXHN F618V2 and TP-Link Archer AX73 router (Wi-Fi 6 , Dual-Band, Gigabit, AX5400, Beamforming, OFDMA, MU-MIMO, HomeShield, OneMesh™, 6 Wi-Fi antennas). Now I want to host the HA on some mini PC with Windows as OS (in the near future there will be hosted some personal site(s) (ASP.NET) for home automation as well). My first thought is to buy a Mini PC Host Beelink SEI8, Intel® Core™ i5-8259U (up to 3.80 GHz), Coffee Lake , 16GB DDR, 512GB SSD, Iris Plus Graphics 655, Wi-Fi 6, Windows 10 Pro - Beelink-Intel-i5-8259U-16GB-512GB
What do you think? Is there also any tutorial about how to configure the internet provider’s GPON ONT (ZXHN F618V2) for DDNS for remote access of the hosted HA?

THANKS for any kind of suggestions, advice, etc.

2

That PC will be sufficient. My server runs really well on an i5 8400 with 16gb RAM with home assistant. But I use ubuntu server 20.04 LTS with supervised installation (even tho its officially not supported, but im a tinkerer so idc) and a windows 10 VM to host the server of my backup solution.
May I ask you, how you wanna install HA? HA Core via WSL2 or a VM with HAOS?
As for remote access, I personally would use a private VPN instead of direct access. As for DDNS, HAOS has an addon for DuckDNS which takes care of everything regarding DDNS.

3

Just read this Home Assistant Windows Portable (HassWP) and watch to this Home Assistant Portable on Windows 10 (Easy) | Install HA Without Any Virtualization | 2021 Guide. For DDNS it looks like my internet provider support that - by enable DDNS in their GPON ONT ZXHN F618V2

4

I personally would be cautious about using the same computer for unrelated tasks.
Microsoft are a HUGE target for hackers (even if only because there are so many Windows PCs out there); and by running a public website you are opening a potential channel for hackers to use.

I would strongly recommend using separate Virtual Machines for your public website, development website, database, home automation, and any other uses. Since each VM has its own OS, each can be tailored to what’s best for the application, and minimise software conflicts. e.g. you can run HAOS in its native linux implementation independent of optimising Windows Server for your website.

Back in the day I used a bare-metal hypervisor VMware to run several VMs on one physical machine, but today I see plenty of recommendations for Proxmox. I haven’t yet done the learning curve for Docker, so that may also be suitable.

Oh, and I would also recommend that the Mini PC is connected by ethernet cable to your Archer router. Wi-Fi 6 specs look impressive, but real world Wi-Fi is often very different.