HA Uses Open-ZWave as well. The current built-in version is OZW 1.4, however the move to OZW 1.6 is in progress (but can be used as a beta at the moment). The OZW 1.6 integration (from what I understand) will utilize a separate addon for this, and it will talk back to HA over MQTT. This is so restarts of HA don’t bring down the Z-Wave network and should mean less downtime overall.
However none of that effects the range. It will effect product compatibility, etc, but the range is still 100% down to the radio/amplifier/firmware on the Z-Wave stick.
Correct. I currently run HA as a VM on a super overpowered server (R510 w/ 2x E5-2680v2), but only because I’ve been doing some hardware reorganization.
I usually have it running on one of my Intel NUCs. I run it as a VM in ESXi to keep things simple and easily portable.
You can pick up a used NUC on ebay for pretty cheap if you shop around. I just purchased a used Optiplex 9010 on eBay for someone else to use for HA. Pretty much any cheap used computer or server will do fine, and small form factor computers are nice for obvious space reasons.
You can also run it on Proxmox, FreeNAS, or unRAID if you have a NAS available.
You can also still run it on a Raspi, but be sure to make sure your database/recorder settings are optimized to not have excessive wear on the SD card leading to early death. The Raspi is ok if you don’t want to do things such as run image processing software like face/person/object detection or other computationally heavy tasks that may bog it down. I hear some people do this just fine on the Pi4, but I just like the idea of a real computer doing those things.
I don’t have any fabaro devices so I can’t comment on any current or past issues with them. My Z-Wave network is pretty light with only a few Inovelli wall switches. I have a lot of Xiaomi devices (mostly their PIR motion sensors) on Zigbee. Most of my devices are WiFi though, flashed with ESPHome. (wall switches, outlet sockets, sensors, power monitoring, etc)