New HA home project - 2 rPi devices - best plan?

Installation
1

Planning a new home automation project based around HA, to run on two rPi devices, let’s call them A and B. Trying to decide which function/software to run on which device for best ease of setup and operation.

Grateful for any suggestions on how to best divide these devices/functions/software over rPi A and B, and whether either of these might be best under Docker or Promox or similar, or just direct install?

  1. Main HA OS and various integrations
  2. Music Assistant
  3. Initially, the main music player device is an analog hifi amp connected via a hi end USB DAC on A or B
  4. Various lights, switches, etc, mostly all Terncy brand, with Terncy hub, probably needing ZB2MQTT
  5. A ZigBee coordinator (have an old one, flashed USB SONOFF, may upgrade to ethernet SMLight if needed)
  6. An rPi-based NAS (Samba or what?) for large music library, plus maybe photos and local backups

Physically, our home routing has 3 points of Mesh WIFI and lots of ethernet everywhere. The Terncy gear is widespread throughout home so ZigBee mesh should be pretty good.

My preliminary idea is this:
rPi A - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
rPi B - 6

Does this sound right ?

2

Put 3, 4 and 6 together, the NAS shouldn’t use much CPU and 2 and 4 might consume more resources. MA can be run on a seperate system without issues.

What versions are your RPi’s?

3

Ahh, thanks. So MA and a player app to drive my DAC-hifi amp could be separate host from HA, just connected by the MA integration in HA, correct ?
Both rPi are 4. Bought a 4TB USB HDD today, planning connect to a Pi with an old powered USB hub so it won’t tax the Pi power supply, use this to host music and other files, and run something like Openmediavault to provide a browser-accessible interface for managing my non-media stored files not under MA. Sound reasonble ?

4

If you don’t already have them, there are much better host computers for less money. A used Intel NUC i5 can be found on eBay for less than the cost of a new Raspberry Pi5, and it will outperform the Raspberry in every metric.

Two??? Why???

I don’t understand the fascination with ProxMox on minimal hardware.
It is a huge mistake to send new Home Assistant users to install ProxMox on a dedicated server like a Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC or other micro PC.

Installing ProxMox requires an understanding of Linux, and if a new Home Assistant user could get ProxMox installed and configured, then they wouldn’t likely be here asking how to install Home Assistant.

I run HAOS on bare metal.

  1. Flash the HAOS image to the boot drive.
  2. Reboot.
  3. That’s it. Done. No learning curve for Proxmox, Docker, VM’s. No USB or Network issue. No managing disk or memory allocations.
    The downside of bare metal? Your Home Assistant host computer is just that. Dedicated to one task. It just works.

If the user needs to run other programs on their Home Assistant server that aren’t available in an add-on, migrating to ProxMox can always be a solution later.

1 Like
5

Happen to have two rPi 4 on hand, leftover from other projects. Trying to conserve $$ if these are sufficient.
ProxMox, never used, Docker I did struggle to use quite a few years back for an unrelated purpose. Only asked about these as not familiar enough with HA and other software I will probably use in this project, so didn’t know whether containerization might be needed or worth the trouble.

6

Have you ever tried Proxmox? It requires just as much Linux understanding as running HAOS. I agree on the minimal hardware part though.

7

Two??? Why???
You are asking for a world of hurt.

I have a single Intel NUC i3 running Home Assistant bare-metal with more than 100 network clients, mostly WiFi, 4 dozen Zigbee devices and a few Z-wave switches. It never occurred to me to run two instances of Home Assistant. There is no reason to do this and the coordination and control would be a nightmare that you don’t need.

I have used Proxmox, VM and Docker and I have yet to find a compelling reason to go through the additional learning curve and potential for something else to go wrong.

If you need something that isn’t already available as a Home Assistant add-on, just run it on another host computer.

8

exactly. In case my original post wasn’t clear, I certainly will only run one instance of HA. Just trying to plan which of the other things I anticipate running might be better hosted separately rather than an HA add-on (if available), and just integrated into HA as needed.

9

I am not sure the DAC will be supported under HAOS and I assume a Raspbian install that uses the default docker compose file will be more likely to work. Added bonus: unless you are familiar with CP, scp and rsync commands, it will be useful to simply use the UI to move your music files around.

I agree that if newly bought a NUC might be better. Also stay away from Proxmox unless needed (you don’t right now).