Quick question.
Should I run HA on a respberry pi 3 b+ or a vm on my unraid server?
Small install with few sensors (20 max sensors/devices), pi is OK
Big install with many devices, cameras or picture entity… I use VM
Pi can run big install but you notice lag. I’m not use Pi4 so maybe this make difference
Home automation always seems to grow. If I had ‘that’ sensor I could do ‘this’. The VM is portable and can be moved, backed up easily, and is easy to maintain. I run VM on ubuntu supermicro server so I am biased to this solution. I notice less delay than when I was on a lesser machine (I have 90 z-wave devices). I also have an it100 for a dsc alarm system that utilizes a serial port. The translation to envisalink runs on the host machine and feeds HA.
It’s also one less piece of hardware to manage.
If you are wanting to retain sensor data for a long time the database can get quite large. The VM server is much easier to manage and size can be increased as needed.