I’m thinking about switching from my Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB to a HP Probook 400 G2 8GB with 256 GB SSD.
Those are sold at approx 100 EUR and I could use the Pi elsewhere.
Currently I only have Hass.io installed on the Raspberry and now I have to decide what’d be the optimal setup on the HP while I also want to use it for Opnsense and maybe some other applications. (opnsense would also work as an Add-On but I’d prefer to run it separately)
Would you go with a virtualization (Proxmox) and running Hass.io in a VM (currently my favorite) or better run Ubuntu + Docker?
Any other ideas?
How hard will migration be?
I’m using several Add-Ons and Integrations while some are more integrated (file editor and so on) and some are standalone “programs” (like EMHASS).
Any other suggestions on how the setup should look like?
I made a similar switch around a year ago. Went from Raspberry Pi 3 with HAOS, to a HP T630 running Proxmox and HAOS in a VM.
I have never tried the Ubuntu + Docker way, so I can’t tell you pro’s and con’s from experience. I can just tell you my experience with the move to a Proxmox VM from the Pi3. But it’s both the same “type” of solution. You run a HAOS in some form of virtualisation.
The transition was quite smooth. I made a full backup of HAOS on the Pi. And used that backup file to restore it on a freshly installed HAOS on Proxmox. The result was basically the same as I had “left” it on the Pi. I just had to change some hardcoded ip-addresses to match the new IP the VM had.
Performance/snappiness/stability improved compared to the Pi. Especially cpu heavy tasks like compiling ESPHome code was much MUCH faster and I haven’t had a freeze or lockup since.
What I like additionally to the Proxmox way is that you can (periodically) backup the whole VM from time to time. So if I mess something up, it’s just a couple of clicks away from being restored. Also I can clone the VM into a “test” VM, and play around with it without it affecting my main HAOS setup.
Also it gave me the option (which at first I thought I wouldn’t use) to run other services in other VM’s completely separated from each other. When something goes terribly wrong in one of them (usually because my n00biness), I stays contained to that VM and all other VM’s keep working fine.
To setup the Proxmox VM is very ease. There is a .cow2 file of HAOS that you can simply import in Proxmox, and HAOS is ready to go.
I’d go the proxmox way, unless you have a specific reason to prefer docker over it. My docker containers (of other services) run in a Proxmox LXC container that runs Debian/Ubuntu. And that works fine.
I don’t have Z-Wave. But the Sonoff Zigbee stick I added recently went without a hitch.
In Proxmox, you “passthrough” the USB device to the HAOS VM. And then it’s recognized by HAOS just like if it was plugged into the Pi.
The only problem I had was that if I plugged in an additional USB serial device (like a Wemos), the serial port would change in HA an break the Zigbee2MQTT. But that was an easy fix (and probably would’ve been the same on the Pi):