Forgive the newbie question as I’m not very familiar with HA and my knowledge of Linux is mid-level. A client of mine uses HA in their brewery. They’ve got three instances for brewery, bar and testing. All running as individual HA OS virtual machines on the same Hyper-V host server. It’s working well but we’re considering adding another VM and memory on the host is getting a bit tight.
A thought was running all three instances on the same VM thus reducing overall memory use - which rules out HA OS so I started reading up on the three other methods of container, core and supervisor.
I’m not sure they’re even running add-ons but I wondered what the technical reason was why container and core can’t use add-ons?
They are just containerised applications managed by the HA supervisor.
Core and Container installs do not have a supervisor, therefore no add-ons.
However for nearly all these add-ons you can find an equivalent container on Dockerhub. You just have to manage updates yourself.
HA OS add-ons do have the advantage of “ingress” which I do not fully understand but it allows web pages from inside these containers to be displayed in Home Assistant easily.
Thanks for the quick reply. Knew it would be an easy question. About the only add-on that might be of use is LetsEncrypt for SSL certificates. I’ll have a look at container edition. I assume that one can restore a backup from the HA OS edition into the new container version?
You manually have to copy the files from the extracted backup archive to the new system.
And before you ask, no you can’t use three Supervised installs on the same machine without separate VMs. Supervised is a very restrictive install method. It must run on Debian (no derivatives) and no other software is allowed on the system.
Yes I saw the pretty strict requirements. They’re fine - I’ve had to build some pretty restrictive Linux builds over the years.
Does make me smile a bit though as Linux is supposed to portable but of course is a right old mess when it comes to version nightmare. Which is of course one of the reason why containers and virtual environments exist.
I’m guessing that HA take this very strict route to cut out the thousands of “How do you get HA running on Centos v7” posts. After all, it’s primarily an open source initiative where resources will always be tight.
I was watching a video of Linus Torvalds just last night where he was saying that Linux Desktop is probably never going to supplant Windows or MAC OS because small developers just can’t afford the time/resources to test applications on a hundreds of different distros.
