How do you guys run home assistant?
I tried out home assistant using virtual box on my main pc and I enjoyed what I could do with it so far. So, I ordered a mini pc (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C89TQ1YF/) with the intention of running home assistant’s OS so that it’s always running regardless of Windows doing what it wants with my PC.
I run other things all the time on my main pc too, plex, isponsorblocktv, tartube, things like that. Is running just home assistant on that mini pc going to be overkill? Should I just put Linux on it and run home assistant on there some other way so that I can also run some of these other things there? Will home assistant take a noticeable performance hit?
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Home assistant in a podman container uses only about 400mb memory and .05% of cpu on my home server.
Put Linux on your mini PC and you can run dozens of services on it without it breaking a sweat.
Same just running in docker have DNS and few other services running side by side on a pi4
Pretty much any cheap minipc will do. A very power efficient N100 is more than enough, and probably cheaper than a Pi board now.
I personally run it on a MiniPC that runs proxmox. You could run other stuff on it through proxmox as well. I would definitely recommend running always on server stuff on something other than your main daily PC.
You could probably run all the other stuff on there as well, although transcoding might slow things down a bit. HA itself should be fine as once you’ve set up all your automations it’s not like you need to interact with it directly and you’ll just get a little bit of lag at worst.
The house has to work damn near 100% of the time, so I run it on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 that has Home Assistant OS with the full stack on it. Works great!
HAOS on a virtual machine inside on unraid on home server made from old pc parts.
I have a “server” cobbled together out of old PC parts. I have proxmox running on it and Home Assistant is one of the VMs running on that machine.
I have HA running as a native service on my home server, which is composed of literal garbage parts from other PCs, and runs many other native services in tandem, including Plex and some VPN gunk. HA has very low system demand, and it only makes sense to use a dedicated system for it if it’s very low-powered and you have no other server in the home.
What you should do is set all of your services up on your new mini PC and use that to host all of your services, allowing you to power down your likely more power-hungry PC.
I run it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (I happened to have a spare one, also BUY EUROPEAN and all that). There’s a dedicated image for it.
HA Supervised running under Debian 12 on a mini laptop with an N200 processor takes about 3% CPU. With the Frigate NVR add-on running 2 security cameras it uses about 10%.
I had it on a old pc, running in a virtual machine alongside other stuff, but switched to running it as HAOS on its own mini pc. Just felt simpler.
I have that Beelink and while I don’t run Home Assistant on it (I run that from a VM on my NAS) , it does run a whole bunch of stuff, including Plex, and it’s more than capable.
I think you have a couple of options here:
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Run HAOS on the bare metal and use Home Assistant addons to add the other functionality you want. Addons are HA managed Docker containers and there’s lots of them out there, including Plex. What I don’t know is whether you can access hardware acceleration this way, which you can do via regular Docker (see below).
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Install something like Unraid, Proxmox or whatever flavour of Linux you prefer - literally anything that supports full blown VMs and Docker at the same time. Install HAOS in a VM and use Docker for everything else. Passthrough /dev/dri to any Docker containers that use hardware acceleration (Plex) and you’re golden.
It’s a great little box. Enjoy!
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I have an Intel NUC (3rd gen I think - it’s several years old by now) which runs Proxmox, which runs several VMs including Home Assistant on HAOS. The only thing I did was upgrade the RAM as the VMs eat this quickly…
Other services I run on this small box are AdGuard, Paperless-ngx, KitchenOwl, tt-rss and two Nightscout instances.
3b+ here. I’d like to upgrade to a 4 or 5 but haven’t had any pressing reason to do it.
Got no home assistant for now but plan to do it. I am running jellyfin, nextcloud, traccar and immich on Beelink s12 pro. But technically you can run all that on any other brand which sells n100 minis. This machin is like 12w under load! Magical! Also can do 4k video easy. Besides all my services, I use it as HTPC under my TV.
Ah, great choice! I use the same model for my NAS. Anyway the N100 is really powerful for this task, and should have enough spare power to allow experimentation with different addons. Plex likes the intel chip and uses it for transcoding, if you want to do that.
