Hi I’m new to home automation, but have been doing a lot of research. I’m trying to figure out the Pro’s & Con’s of different installation setups before I make my decision.
As of right now I am contemplating between installing Home Assistant OS on a virtual machine in a Synology NAS with a skyconnect dongle. Or should I consider buying a Home Assistant Yellow or Green.
Im purchasing a new home soon and want to deck it out with all the gadgets and automations. Im going to want to do some of the more complicated automations so I’m trying to figure out which system will be the best.
So if you guys could give me some insight on the pros and cons of each of these that would be great!
Home Assistant as such do not require much, so all of them should work.
The issues with hardware resources come when you want to do extra things like process video imagery and/or maybe run a media server on the side. This things require a good CPU and with video processing also RAM.
The better option is then often a small PC, like a Intel NUC or similar, where you can stuff it with RAM, SSD and a decent CPU, and then install Proxmox or similar hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines.
Another thing to consider is how large you want your automation network to be. If it’s a dozen devices, then a rPi or equivalent is sufficient. If you plan to have a lot of devices, multiple protocols, tons of automation and really make your house super smart, you might be better off with a VM or dedicated computer. I outgrew my rPi with an SD fast, and moved to rPi with SSD which I then outgrew fast and went with a VM and anticipate that at some point I may end up with a dedicated computer but I have hundreds of devices with more automations and scripts than is worth counting and log significant amounts of history - all things that tax a poor little rPi device pretty rapidly.
Which synology do you have? If it’s not ancient one then i wouldn’t think anymore… Vm is the way to go, for numerus reasons: you have security (if one hdd fails you don’t loose any data from HA), you already have the hardware, so you won’t spend money for new one and for additional electricity. Only make sure that you have enough ram - it’s advisable to assing at least 2GB (currently my HA takes 1.4GB, i have 4Gb assigned) so it’s better to assign 4GB of ram for ha, just in case… In most syno’s max ram can be bigger that official number: on my ds920+ it’s officialy 8GB, but i have 20 (4+16) GB without any problem, so do a bit of research before upgrading your syno ram.
I’ve had HA on intel NUC for a couple of months - it was i7 7th generation, 32gb ram and 1tb ssd. Only difference between VM and nuc was HA restart speed, all other things aren’t worth mentioning. Now i have HA on VM again, because i bought NUC for my workshop pc, not for HA… but i just had to test it…