I’m about to setup HomeAssistant and start switching all of my home control to it, and I’m running into a question of what is the best place to install it in. My options include RPi4 4Gb, NUC i7 and Synology RS820+. All of them have their downsides.
RPi4 is almost ideal option, but no SSD boot for HassOS makes it a no go for me. I’ve installed and configured HomeAssistant three times before on SD card just to get corrupted SD card within month and no options to get it back to working order. I live in the are where power outages are pretty common, and while I have all of my equipment connected to UPSs and 2 Powerwalls backing up the whole house, when the power goes out at night, sometimes all of them run out before I wake up in the morning.Hence corrupted SD cards. Making snapshots on the schedule, unfortunately doesn’t help, because I use Vera integration for all of my ZWave equipment, and Vera, for some reason, renames all devices with ever single request for integration. So, until native SSD boot will be available on RPi 4, I would rather wait.
NUC is a huge overkill, and going to be eating a lot of power. While it’s HA isn’t going to tax it at all, and it can run in power-saving mode all the time, it’s still a lot more energy consumption then RPi. I’m trying to keep my power consumption down, since my house already consumes huge amount of energy.
Synology might also be a good option, it shouldn’t have a problem running HA + addons, and it will already be up all the time, for NAS access anyways. One problem that I have with it, is I want to control my Monoprice Audio Matrix switch, which requires physical cable, and my media rack is located on the opposite side of the house from my networking rack that houses Synology.
Anyways, none of those options seems to be ideal, so any suggestions will be welcome. There seems to be a way to run HA off of RPi SSD and boot from SD card, and another way of booting from SSD but not running from the official image. Maybe those options are worse considering?
I’m planning on running HA with NodeRED, Grafana, NUT, MQTT addons and probably a bunch more once I get it all setup.
My understanding is RPi 4 is capable of running all of that without too much trouble. And power consumption is going to be significantly lower on RPi 4, then on i7 (even though it’s a few generation old at this point). Considering this is something that’s going to be running 24/7, I would prefer lower power consumption. If RPi4 is not an options - sure, I’ll run it on my NUC, it’s just collecting dust now anyways.
So use the rPi4… you aren’t locked in forever. If you change your mind later just do a snapshot and upload that to the new platform. I changed from a rPi3 to a NUC running HassOS then to a NUC running Ubuntu and both times it was super easy
I’ve had trouble with snapshots before, because of the integration with Vera and changing IDs of all ZWave equipment that is registered there. Maybe I was doing something wrong, though. Totally possible.
It’s entirely possible I will do the same in the future, but right now, my Vera doesn’t give me any trouble at all. As in, I have scheduled scenes on it, and connection to Alexa, and I have to reboot it about once a year. All other times it’s rock solid. If I can get HA to the same level of stability, then I will definitely migrate all my ZWave equipment over. I already have a few ZWave USB sticks lying around anyways. My I’m a big proponent of seamless and invisible smart home, so I basically never even launch Vera UI at all. Everything controlled through either physical hardware, scenes or Alexa. So right now, Vera doesn’t bother me much.
I would install Proxmox on the nuc then run Home Assistant in a virtual machine. That would allow you to run other vms in the future as needed to make better use of the nuc.
Fair enough, granted I had the old Vera3. I have heard they are better now. I still would have thought that restoring from a snapshot should not affect the HA->Vera link though
I would (and do) install esxi and run as vm. That way you can share the resources of the nuc. And since you have synology you can run backup for business and make snapshot backup with incremental forever (I do every hour). Rocksolid and superflexible and save.
I wouldn’t even do any of the options suggested here for VM. I personally have my HA running on a NUC i3 virtual machine on windows 10 with Hyper-V. Was very easy, just make sure you create an external Ethernet connection. I actually took a back up from my Rpi4, did the install then used Samba to restore my RPi4 backup. Works beautifully and have no issues.
Or like I said in post #4… he isn’t locked in forever. This isn’t a decision about whether or not to cut off his arm… the chosen platform can be changed later very easily via snapshots
Thanks for all suggestions. I installed HA on my NUC directly (no VM), because, right now, I have no plans to run anything else there. For most other things I need, I have Synology where I can run all media-center related stuff (Sonarr, Emby, Jackett, etc.). Took a while to setup HA on NUC, because instructions on the “Getting Started” guide are incorrect for NUC, but it’s up and running now.
