Should I upgrade to RPi4 or use a VM machine?

Installation Home Assistant OS
21

I’m running hassio on a VM on an i3 NUC running ESXi. 16GB ram, 240GB SSD. using a conbee2 passed through to it.

No trouble with it. Reboots in 30 seconds or so (I think) It’s far faster than the PI.

And you get the benefits of snapshots before upgrades.

I’m also running a bunch of other VMs on it for other things. Like a separate VM for mqtt. (and another to handle cert renewal.)

22

A restart of the homeassistant container (via HomeAssistant GUI) takes 36 seconds
The restart of the whole RPI takes 2min 57 seconds.

For me thats ok because I dont often need restarts

23

I run HA on Synology in docker, works perfect :+1:

24

I upgraded from Pi 3B to Pi 4B 4GB.
Pi 4 in an all-heatsink fanless enclosure. It now runs like a dream.

But in the upgrade process, I’ve made a few changes, which no doubt helped:

  • Switched from Raspbian venv install to HassIO generic Linux install, still Raspbian.
  • Switched to the MariaDB addon (which sped up history and logs considerably)
  • Using RAMDisk on the 4GB RAM for Addons, Config, tmp folders and /var/log.
    In total, 3GB allocated to RAMdisk. Stable at less 1.5GB utilisation at the moment.
    As far as I can see, no more small constant writes to the SD card. Ensuring longevity.

Reboot takes a while because it has to write back all changes on RAMdisks (1-2 min), and reload over 1GB of data on boot up (a few minutes). But I don’t reboot the whole system often enough to be bogged down.
HA and addons restart quickly.

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25

I like the idea of using a RPi4 but I don’t want to deal with SD cards’ corruption. Did you install the image found at: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/?

Thanks for your input.

26

I’m using Raspbian image off official Raspberry pi website.
Then followed these instructions to get “Home Assistant” (formerly HassIO) up and running: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/#alternative-install-on-a-generic-linux-host

This allows me to run custom scripts and other applications in the generic Linux environment. Such as use log2ram program for /var/log, set up RAMdisks for HassIO folders. Latter is based on the same idea as log2ram, using scripts written by myself.

27

ahem…

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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28

Intel Nuc running proxmox hypervisor so I can run other vm’s at the same time.

I love my pi but this was a good investment for me.

Note after doing this if you still want better performance from logs, change your DB from the default to Maria. Some of the slowness was not the PI at all, but rather the default db. Now it’s fast like it should be.

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