What devices do everyone use to run Home Assistant? Do you have any recommendations? I want to use a low-power development board to run it
Yellow Box. It runs HA perfectly. I added a 520 GB SSD (though much less is needed) and make daily double backups (SSD and Google Drive).
I started off like most with a Pi 3B then a Pi4. Now I run my Zigbee and printer server HA on a cheap Dell Wyse 5070 thin client running Proxmox and my main HA is on a GMKTec G5 also running Proxmox.
I think its best to start off with an SBC like a Pi or an old pc/laptop then build from there as your needs grow.
Started with Pi3 then Pi4. Now using a Beelink U59 Pro.
1 Like
HP Proliant DL360 Gen7 Server with 2x2.66GHz X5650 Hexa Core Processors and 32GB Memory with VMWARE ESXI 6.7.
Do you want low power or performance?
I have Home Assistant installed on an Intel NUC i3 but I can control (run?) it from any browser. Plus I have a couple of OpenHasp devices as well. Not exactly “low power”, but I enjoy being able to perform a Home Assistant restart in about one minute. Six cameras on Frigate and almost 100 smart-home devices.
Most users, just a guess from watching the users on the forum, use a Raspberry Pi4. Quite a few Home Assistant Yellow servers and a few less Home Assistant Green servers.
My preference is to run HAOS “bare metal” on a 64-bit x-86 PC. But there are several different installation methods. You can buy used Intel NUCs and similar micro-PCs for the price of a new Raspberry Pi5 + case + power supply.
Here you go, directly from the analytics page itself. Scroll down to “Board Types” and you’ll get models and percentages.
The problem I find with the analytics is that the virtual machine category is too vague.
The real question would be what are the advantages and disadvantages of one over the other.
I chose the Yellow Box because (1) it was developed by the people of HA and (2) it comes with HA loaded.
HP Elitedesk 800 G2 - mini form factor, great little machine. Running HA on a Proxmox VM, very simple setup.
The main advantage of running it virtualized is that you get less hardware dependent. If you run it of shared storage you have the possibility of moving the workload around between hosts. It also makes full backups easier (you can backup or restore the whole machine, or single files if you want that) and snapshots are also great to have. In a more advanced setup you can utilize replication so to safeguard more against host failures.
If you run a bare metal installation you get more vulnerable to hardware failures and will most likely spend more time coming back online in the event of hardware failure.
2 Likes
Started with PI3 then PI4 with NV2 NVMe KINGSTON SSD 210 GB and RAM 8 GB.
Check Analytics for Board types.
I have two BeeLink’s N100 mini PC’s that run Proxmox in a cluster. Running the Home Assistant OS as a VM. One advantage is that I can do a snapshot backup of the VM in seconds and if one node fails, I can move the Zigbee and Z-wave USB devices to the other Proxmox node and restart the VM there.
1 Like
I switched to a network based Zigbee coordinator (I don’t use Z-Wave) so that I can move around without having to move the USB dongle. Not sure if network based Z-Wave exists, but would maybe work with a network based USB hub.
1 Like
Not completely true. A hardware failure is a hardware failure. Either way, bare metal or virtualized you still have to do a restore on new hardware. Restoring a container may save a few minutes, but in four years I have only had one hardware problem requiring replacing the host and restoring the latest backup. I was down for less than an hour. As I said before, (highly) advanced users can do failure rollover so that the user never sees a problem.
No, you do not need to restore on new hardware if you have a virtualized setup with multiple hosts and shared storage. Even without shared storage you can start your vm up straight from backup. Same way with a container, no restore needed if you have hardware to run it on and access to storage.
Your downtime of less than an hour would be less than 30 seconds in my setup.
They all have advantages over other methods, but the end goal of getting Home Assistant installed and functioning is the same. I prefer bare metal because I don’t see any advantage of containers or virtuals that makes learning container or virtual management worth the effort. But that’s me.
This is a good choice for the reasons you list. I have never seen a yellow in the wild, but it is basically an industrial version of the Raspberry Pi4. It appears that it is HAOS on bare metal.
You keep saying that - you really should watch a intro video on youtube on virtualization and containerization, maybe you would see why it is benificial.
1 Like
I have. And as I said, I see no advantage of adding the extra layer to single-purpose host hardware. Home Assistant is all that the host will ever see.
You’ve been told the advantages so many times now that I suspect you just don’t want to listen 
1 Like