Roadmap for move of HA from a PI 4 to Windows

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hello

I have been successfully running HA on a PI 4 (4Gb) for a few years now. I only have a few Zwave sensors and a Zwave light switch so it’s not exactly a complex installation. I need to use the PI 4 for something else now and as new PI 4’s seem to be almost unobtainable to buy (and will be for some time due to chip supply) I have to move the HA onto something else. I do have Windows 7 running on a low power machine that I thought I could put the HA on.

I couple of things come to mind though. I haven’t updated HA for about at least a year and haven’t made the move to Open Zwave either.

I was wondering what would be the best process for the move?

Thanks

Interalia

2

have you considered a 2nd hand mini PC? I started on a PI then moved to a very old NUC and am now switching to something like the HP Elitedesk 800 G2 or the Lenovo M93p? Lots of options for installation - VM using proxmox is very popular. Personally I’ll be trying the x86-64 image approach first.

here’s a couple of ebay examples I considering at present:

Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p, Small PC MFF, i5, 8GB Ram, 180 GB SSD, Win 10 Pro | eBay

USFF Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 i3-4150T 3.0GHz 500GB SSHD 4GB WIN 10 PRO 888772544249 | eBay

you should easily be able pick something up for less than $/£100 depending on where you are in the world.

Hope this helps

1 Like
3

If the Windows 7 PC isn’t doing anything, I would just install Windows 10 Pro on it, then install VmWare Workstation. Then just do a simple HA restore into the VM.

Or, if you don’t need that computer for anything other than HA, you could install the generic x86-x64 version

4

That’s a lot of breaking changes you are going to have to deal with.

5

I moved from Windows because sometimes forced updates from Microsoft resulted in the HA VM not automatically starting. Waking up in the morning and slowly working out why the house isn’t working was annoying. I now use HASSOS running on a VirtualBox VM under Ubuntu. I set the machine up as dual boot, so the old Windows install is still there should I need it.

6

I agree. You can postpone Windows updates, but you can’t stop them. Eventually, Windows WILL install the updates, and you have no control over that.

7

On a side note, I was quite shocked reading in Eben Upton’s latest post on the subject that “We have […] to prioritise commercial and industrial customers”.

I still remember tho good ol’ times when RPI’s were for hobbyists and eduction. Time flies… :pensive:

8

Thanks to all for the suggestions/advice.

I have a few odd ball emulators running on the Win 7 Pro machine (I mentioned above) that I would want to retain so I think I will get another cheap low power usage mini PC and try the native x64 Hassio OS. I will take the opportunity to update everything including the move over to OpenZwave.

Cheers

Interalia

9

Check if VirtualBox still runs on Win7 and run it in a VM.

10

With due respect to windows users, running HA on windows is like … like … running a Tesla on 2 AA batteries.