first of all, if you are reading this in time: Merry Christmas!
I’ve managed to destroy 3 SD cards in RPIs over the last year which seriously decreased the WAF. I have a relatively complex setup with lots of integrations, so performance was not optimal, even on a RPI4.
I decided to upgrade to a NUC with an i3-10110U, 16GB RAM and a nvme SSD. I took the NUC image with Home Assistant OS, it’s running pretty well.
Now I have another PI which died due to sd-card failure (Volkszaehler energy metering). I would like to dockerize this. I would like to avoid running another machine, as electricity is expensive in Germany.
Now
a) is it possible to access HAOS to add docker containers on my own? I guess this is not recommended.
b) is it possible to put HAOS in a virtual machine on the NUC? Does anyone have experience with that, especially performance-wise? Which virtualization platform?
c) What are the downsides of installing HASS directly as a docker container? Is there an overview somewhere?
I recently took the plunge and installed Proxmox on a cheap, low powered XCY mini PC with 4GB RAM and a Pentium N3530.
I used Whiskerz script
to run Home Assistant OS 5.9 and it went smoothly. It was a steep learning curve for me getting to grips with virtual machines and containers, but I now have additional LXC containers running Open VPN, a LAMP server and Open canary.
Considering the relatively low power and memory of my setup, it rarely gets above 8% CPU and it only uses c. 2/3 of the memory. My HA install includes seven add-ons including Mosquitto, Influx, Grafana and Maria DB. This should give you a good feel for how your system would perform if you went down this route.
I really like the extra control and flexibility that Proxmox gives me with effortless backup, restore and creation of new VM’s and containers. I was very surprised at how little the extra overhead of running Proxmox added and I still have plenty of headroom to add more containers.
If you are thinking of redoing your setup, I would go with this: Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10
It gives you full access to Debian on you NUC and does install a supervised version of Home Assistant.
After that you can indeed add as many docker containers as you want and if you want to do this the easy way, the Portainer addon in Home Assistant helps a great deal.