I have a windows host running other services, so when i started my HA journey, Hyper-V seemed like the obvious choice. I quickly realised USB passthrough was going to be an issue.
In the end, i went with VirtualBox, monitored by a third party application I have called AlwaysUp. Its been rock solid. I’m running a dell mini pc with an i5 7th gen processor, and from a cold start, HA takes about a minute to come up.
an HA restart takes about 15-30 seconds, and a reboot, where the state of the VM has been saved before the PC shutdowns is about the same.
One thing I never thought of (until now), was going to Z2M route (rather than ZHA), and running the MQTT broker on the windows host and have HA access it over the network. That way, Hyper V avoids the USB passthrough issue, but I’m happy with my current setup.
EDIT: although even ZHA seems possible:-