NUC instead of Pi4

You will want to look up some of the github projects that enable this, and go onto the Blue Iris forums for better opinions. Its a complicated product, that is tied to Windows (Which contrary to many people I will argue is not a bad thing, just what it is) and containerising that in a WINE environment brings its own issues. Most of the time, people running this kind of solution will report bad issues, but the real cause is their misconfiguration or lack of understanding in docker and/or linux. A docker container of a Windows-only binary in a Linux container, using WINE is one of those multi-dimension solutions that you need to be a DevOps Engineer to understand (I am a DevOps/SRE Engineer).
This is a not a judgement on anyone’s skill, but just saying it’s a complex solution, but does work, and depending on who you ask you may get wildly different answers.

Look me up on the unRAID forums as KptnKMan.
All my details and specs related to unRAID are already listed there.

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That I can perfectly understand. I had to run a docker container for flight radar and it was one hell of a container to maintain. It made me hate docker. I even tried portainer but still had to restart manually the container every second day.
I thank @MaxW for his add-on, it solved the issue, once and for all.

That’s why I have three NUCs. I don’t want to run more on my Home Assistant server that I can’t install through HACS.

You misunderstand my statement, I’m talking about raw performance vs something like a Pi3 or Pi4. In most cases a NUC is really a lot of performance for just HassOS, and will be very underutilised.

There is ABSOLUTELY reason to utilise the capabilities of the hardware to run more stuff and optimise its usage. I said that running unRAID on a NUC is probably a really good idea, as it would allow more to run on a single box.

If you don’t want to learn Docker then that’s one thing, but it’s not what I meant. I think learning Docker is a good idea for anyone and everyone. There’s a lot that can be done with Docker, but that’s your choice.

Yes, one NUC-i7 with enough RAM and an SSD (tall case) would do all that. But, if one feature fails, then everything on that NUC may become useless while troubleshooting the problem.

I think I paid about $50 for my latest NUC, but it had no PSU, RAM or M.2 drive, so by the time I added all that, my total cost was more like $125.

Which NUC to buy- Any of them would work for HA. From my experience, if the PC will run Ubuntu, it will run the native HA image.

Here’s an i5 on eBay, current bid is $46.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/304651623706?hash=item46eea6dd1a:g:79UAAOSwvC5jPX3F&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAAkPLzo9zliNQqtvIfuQDBT6So2xR5mdKWUNPDQWiRyfmOqDQsDtQMotcSuVRL4O9qL253%2BVJRbqgk2XzPo%2FW04edOv3ZN%2FpEM3dmiAPkZOeSwEM0htd7fNgyqakB75iRKMsaU9kJRe1My%2FAVSLqx7xbG1coBD8fjmV%2BByYDxJPsomTnN9MmLzHorV03%2FtL6M%2FAw%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR_a_0ff4YA

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In the end, I have gone with the option of two NUCs. It is not yet all set up. I am still learning. There is a developer called tteck. In his GitHub repo are scripts to automate the installation of various HA flavors in Proxmox environment. I’ve gone with his Home Assistant VM and have not yet regretted it.

I have bought two NUCs. One, older, slower, intended to run important stuff (like HA, DNS, auth, dashboard, Nginx reverse proxy …). The faster NUC is intended for media and files (Jellyfin, AudioBookshelf, *arr stack, qBittiorrent, Nextcloud, …). Both are running Proxmox, so when both instances are joined together in one system, a cluster, there is an option to enable high availability (also abbreviated as HA) for a VM or container. I haven’t yet set it up, but it should work in the way that the same VM (in my case it would be HA and DNS) continues to work on the other server if the first one gets unavailable.

Hardware specs for the smaller machine are i3-6110U, 12GB memory, 120GB m.2 SATA SSD. HAOS uses 2 vCPUs, 32GB disk, and 4GB memory (which is interestingly 95% full, I might have to extend that). The other machine uses i5-8259U, 24GB memory, 500GB m.2 NVMe SSD.

At the moment I cannot say anything about power consumption. Certainly, the smaller NUC uses a bit more power than the Rpi did. The bigger one is intended to step in for local services instead of a desktop machine that had run for years. So the final goal is to get better power consumption and less space required with the two NUCs instead of a desktop and an RPi which is easily reachable.

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I had the same thought process… impossible to find a RPi4 so started to explore alternative.
I settled for a NUC with a Celeron N4505 (TWD 10W) and 16GB of Ram. I run HAOS in a VM with a Proxmox host. This allows me to run several instances to have a production one and a test one.

I backup my HA to my NAS using the Samba backup add-on.

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Hello guys, i would to buy a NUC to install OS home assistant. Could you recomend a specific one? thanks in advance for ypur support, regards

Almost anyone you can buy out there is more powerful than a Pi4, even for a 5-7 year old model.

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You can use a Celeron or Pentium NUC, or an older i3 NUC, and it will be more than adequate.

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Ram is more important than raw cpu specs. Try for 8g or more.

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My operational HA is an old N3050 Celeron NUC with 8GB ram and it works fine, CPU sits at 5% avg and Memory at 1GB.

I had purchased a Lenovo M93p tiny with an i5-4570T and 8GB to replace it but have kept it for my dev system as ESPHome compile times are much faster, so it is more useful as a dev box:

M93p Tiny i5-4570T 8GB 128G SSD: 65.66 secs

NUC NUC5CPYH Celeron N3050: 339.29 secs

I would migrate to NUC if its HASSOS support mounting NAS disk volume. This limitation of RPI has been bothering me quite a long time.

It is possible to mount a nas in hassos.

But you could also use supervised.

What to do with 3x NUC i5?

So far I’m running HA on an RPi 4 (4GB) with external SSD and I’m happy with it. Especially because the update process is worry-free.
I have equipped my whole house with Smarter Infrastructure. All blinds, lights and locks. All media devices, even the coffee machine and washing machine. In addition, there are 5 video cameras. Also about 50 motion sensors and magnetic contacts. I use a separate RPi Zero W with deCONZ/Conbee II as a Zigbee coordinator.

But I’m getting three computers in NUC format this week. All three are Fujitsu Esprimo Q958 with i5 processors.

I’m thinking about how to use them sensibly as a home server. Of course, I could assign dedicated roles to each of the three servers.

-One as a PVR with image recognition, possibly also as a SAT-IP TV server.
-One as a home server,
-and the third with HAOS.
But that would probably waste an incredible amount of resources.
So it makes me think about getting into Proxmox, and HAOS-VM.

What would you advise me to do with the hardware?

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High Availability Cluster

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability

If a virtual machine (VM) is configured as High Availability (HA) and the physical host fails, the VM is automatically restarted on one of the remaining Proxmox VE Cluster nodes.

That could be an option

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Thanks @tteck, yes this is definitely an option to consider.
I assume, I can also do snapshots to rollback an Update of HA, am I right?

So you would recommend to migrate from HAOS on a Raspi to HAOS VM on Proxmox? Could I use the Pi as quorum element for the custer?
Could the third NUC then used on demand if even more calculation power is needed? I know, that I only need the Power of three i5 once in a while.

Yes, snapshots and full VM backups. (my VM’s/LXC’s automatically backup every 4hrs)

YES! https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

No

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I’m considering upgrading my Rpi 3B.

First I was looking to buy a Rpi 4, but these things are hard to get and quite expensive too.
So I’m considering a mini PC now. It’s about the same price if you calculate everything together, housing, cooling, power supply. And mostly easy to mount and having better specs.

So almost seems to be a no-brainer to step up to a mini PC.

I’m going to use the mini PC only for the HASS installation. So I guess I don’t need a ton of resource or extreme high specs (useless to get overkill specs) to keep the price low. But also leaning towards power consumption. So I thought a cheap mini PC with a celeron could be a good option.

Found a few mini PC’s with the following processors so far:

  • Celeron N3350
  • Celeron N5095
  • Celeron N5105

I’m actually leaning towards the N5105 here. It’s not that much more expensive but feels a bit more future-proof with it’s improved performance. And I believe it has about the same power consumption as the N3350.

Anny ideas if this usable as a base for a HASS mini PC? And is it sufficient? Those Celerons are not that overwelming, but I believe they outrun the specs of the Rpi 4 when checking the benchmarks?

Yes it will be fine. Get lots of ram.

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