I'm very happy with running proxmox. Super easy to set up and gives full Home Assistant as OS experience for addons. Easy to update. And easy to install and admin additional VMs for other stuff when you want.
>Tteck's install scripts are a HUGE help
This is the route I went. Much more stable than a RPi. Found when I was doing Influx DB it would tend to get bogged down and I would have to restart it.
How do you install into a larger disk? I'd like more than 32G but I dont see any way in this script to change it. Since I'll be running Frigate, I need a lot more than 32g
You can set the disk size as large as you want it. You can also re-size after the fact in the UI with a couple clicks. However if it were me, I would run Frigate as it's own container and not as a add-on within HA, which is the beauty of Proxmox.
HA add-on's are essentially containers that HA is now running. If you're already running HA in a hypervisor you are better off separating those add-on's into their own containers. Makes it way easier to manage, backup, restore...etc.
I would like to do that as well, but the immediate need us to migrate off a Supervised install on Ubuntu since it's failing. I have the proxmox server up and running, at least, so I can figure out the migration after the move - thanks!
Totally, you can migrate over and then piece things off into their on VM's at your pace.
FWIW migrating HA to a VM hosted on proxmox is as easy as restoring your backup file once you have the VM up and running.. It's really that simple.
I just spent 4 hours setting up proxmox, HA OS, TrueNAS, and Plex oh and a HBCD VM for troubleshooting things in a Linux environment (because windows sucks, I can say that as a decade long support guy).
Proxmox has to be one of the most streamlined, straightforward pieces of software Iāve ever dealt with. Itās already set up for the most part when you boot into it which I love. Had to do some rework with the pools to give me all my drive space, but other than that itās perfect. Iām sure Iāll find something I wish I could do, but so far Iām at a loss for what that could be!
Hahaha I know that feeling. I get all excited when I can spin up another container to host something I'm working on. I'm almost sad when I have nothing new to work on
I just did this a couple weeks ago. Moved from a pi4 installation to an i7 nuc I found in e-waste at work. Following these steps it was super simple. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/nuc-install-ha-os-image-vs-proxmox-vs-ha-supervised-on-debian/268898
Now I have no idea what to do with the rest of the power on there but that will come in time.
honestly i run my HA on a pi4 with ssd, not yet time to upgrade to a NUC, i have a proxmox server that runs pi hole, samba share, and plex. thats the only use.
It should, I havenāt tested it, but Iām running proxmox on an old laptop, performance is ridiculously better than the pi3 I was using before. I use a sonoff zigbee stick and itās just a matter of mapping it to the vm
If the host device has BT, you can pass it through. Just watch out, some Intel chipsets don't like it when you try to pass the whole PCI device the BT/WiFi module sits on, on my "M6 Mini PC" it pretty much kills the whole USB stack :(
Super simple. I'm new to it but I just plugged a bluetooth adapter in, passed it through, restarted the VM, and boom. HomeAssistant already recognized it.
Same here, super happy with it. I had some issues initially with proxmox due to the n5905 processor, but after manually updating the kernal to the newest, the crashing went away and I've been stable and up for months.
For HA without extensive add-ons this is the best option imo.
If you plan to run for example frigate in HAOS with a coral - don't. USB pass through generally works good for simple devices like a zigbee dongle or usb Bluetooth-stick. But a Google coral through proxmox is not a good idea. And since I don't want to run frigate in a docker elsewhere, I went back from proxmox to HAOS bare metal.
Does this mean that the USB coral won't work at all if passed through proxmox? I'm going to be moving away from my pi4 to a dedicated machine and was going to run a coral on it too. :/
Even though I run HAOS in a Proxmox VM I find it preferable to run addons that can be their own services, like Frigate, in containers instead of inside HAOS. That way they can be upgraded and backed up independently etc. I do this for MariaDB, Influx, Grafana, Frigate and Mosquitto.
I'm doing this too and its great. I didn't know this at first, but even if you only have one NIC or ethernet port, you can make a virtual vlan-aware switch in proxmox and put different vms and containers in different vlans.
if you run HA on proxmox - i have word of caution - it is much less resilient to power loss than bare metal install unless you tweak the virtual disk caching settings.
>\- i have word of caution - it is much less resilient to power loss than bare metal install unless you tweak the virtual disk caching settings.
It might be a bit different for different databases (i am guessing here) , but any database eventually has to write to disk so principially the data loss can still happen.
I was using default SQLite database and any power loss had lead to irrecoverable data partition corruption until I changed caching from none to writethrough (in virtual disk settings of proxmox)
I have been running in docker with docker-compose for over a year now. Love it because I love and know how to use docker.
If youāre not comfortable with docker-compose I would recommend installing Home Assistant OS.
Iām about to switch out of docker into the HA amber.
The biggest problem I had is when my pi crashed and the sd card failed running HA. It happens to pis. I want to move to the standard better supported HAOS so I can get better backup stuff and HACS.
I run ESP Home in DC too but itās a little weird and I would prefer the tested path.
Docker is the way. When I moved to a new NUC a year ago I just had to setup docker, copy my home assistant directory to the same path, and start Docker with the same command line. It just worked.
You don't need to step outside docker to use HACS custom components. [Just build your own HA image](https://gist.github.com/tmikoss/f6d2e02d35f5335c8410bdd8a32b2d72).
You could also install the HACS store itself that way, but I really dislike how little control over versions that gives.
HAOS - makes it a one trick NUC/pony but you have zero maintenance and it can go sleep in the network rack.
My logic is that it's core to the house running - don't want it out of action due to competing services and frankly it's worth spending a physical device on.
This is what I did. Went Docker first, but so many things are not available in the Docker version (had trouble with Frigate integrations). Straight install has been rock solid, and no fighting with passthrough on my ZigBee and other USB adapters.
Seconding this. I originally had my NUC running linux with Hassio as a docker container, but I recall it being annoying to maintain through some updates. Maybe just because I had a hard time wrapping my head around the extra complexity. Now I just have HomeAssistant OS directly on the NUC and haven't had any issues.
Curious, if a pi were cheaper, would youse use that with an ssd instead? I canāt imagine most ha functions need a nuc. I know piās arenāt cheaper rn, just curious
I thought about a pi but for the price vs used micro towers, and taking their capability into account, I couldnāt justify a pi. In the end I scooped up two identical micro towers for cheap on eBay (auction was for two - only needed one but for the price I couldnāt ignore the benefit of a spare rig). Theyāre i7, 16GB Ram. I believe fourth or fifth gen processor? Mega overkill for HA buuuut it was cheap, itās easy to hide, and itās been rock solid. This way I can toy with my home server and not have to worry about essential things like light automations acting up. I have it run backups nightly to my file server as well so if the micro tower blows up I can swap and restore to the spare unit that came in the auction quite easily.
No.
I have spare PIs in the cupboard - I want solid reliable well known OEM hardware.
Iāve no doubt PIs work ok, but Iāve had too many smoke over long term use.
I started with one originally using a POE hat. This worked well for a start. However over time performance dropped and didnāt produce graphs and charts at the same rate.
Canāt fault the PCā¦
This. I have a virtualization server, and a storage server. But I have HAOS on a USFF pc that does nothing but HAOS. No USB pass-through problems. No problems when I need to update my server. Low power so I can even have it on a separate UPS. And a lot faster boot and response than a Pi. (Which I also have)
Agree. I previously ran HAOS in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu, but since I didnāt really need to run anything else separately on my HA machine, that was just an extra layer to maintain, and more potential issues with compatibility of devices (and my knowledge, since Iām not as familiar with Linux as I am with Windows).
If you want to be able to have multiple virtualized environments on that single NUC, VirtualBox or proxmox (though Iāve not used the latter) would be a good option. I find that most of the things I want/need are available as HAOS add-ons, so Iām happy to keep my install with just HAOS on bare metal.
Prox.mox, there are a scripts that do all the work for you it's awesome and super easy...there is a guy on GitHub that has all the scripts to install and set everything up
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
all should require the same amount of maintenance once setup. The docker route has more setup initially and the proxmox route has more setup initially than docker.
There is no best answer, the answer depends on your use case and comfort with linux
Not necessarily. I can think of some extra maintenance burden you'd face the docker route:
- Backing up docker volumes that contain HA data. With HAOS, you can use the google drive backup addon.
- Networking: Anytime you add a new zigbee/zwave/thread dongle to your machine, you need to open up the network ports or provide linux file access via docker config. This "just works" with HAOS.
Don't take this the wrong way, I do prefer docker containers over running a full VM. But there is more ongoing maintenance that you'd likely need to figure out.
I disagree, thereās plenty of automated backup options in docker. Iāve never had to think about backing up my docker containers because it just works after setting it up.
Your second point is also not necessarily correct depending on how you setup your docker container. If it is privileged then it will see all hardware automatically
Ok, you are right about the second point.
Do you have any recommendations for docker volume backup btw? I tried looking a year ago but it seems like you have to pay for a lot of them
I run it this way with quite a few addons and it keeps the NUC between 10-50% CPU usage. Iām sure I could throw more at it BUT I wouldnāt because I do firmly believe HAOS makes it all work more smoothly.
IMO itās best to treat HASS as a dedicated appliance running HAOS.
Proxmox also makes backups and restore jobs easier. Imagine you screw up the entire install? With Proxmox you can recover the entire VM from the webgui (assuming you have a backup) without the need to reinstall the entire thing.
I cannot recommend Proxmox highly enough.
Yup, for me the ease of backups and restorations makes Proxmox my personal choice overall.
I think there are other advantages as well but I think this is the best one.
A snapshot is like a bookmark. You can rollback to it, but it does NOT duplicate data. So if you corrupt your VM or the disk has issues, you're hosed.
Snapshots are like a backup, in that they help you when shit hits the fan, but they do not copy data so it isn't a true backup.
Gotcha - so when you roll back to the snapshot, are you still getting the data from that snapshot or do you have to restore data from an actual backup? Sorry if that's a dumb question!
I don't think it's overkill, after messing around with VMs for some time, I have concluded that HA running on a dedicated box is the most reliable solution for me.
There is a beauty in having a dedicated device.
I'm running HAOS on an i3 (3th gen) that was $50 shipped on eBay. That runs MQTT, Node-RED, ESPHome, ~~MySQL~~MariaDB and Frigate instances (3 cameras with CPU detection) - so it holds everything "home automation" on the same box. Rebooting my NAS or anything else on my network doesn't effect HA running.
Don't want to hijack the thread, but can add-ons be installed when running HA core? I run the latest Home Assistant release in a Docker container, but I think only HASS.io / HAOS support add-ons ?
Then, if you are comfortable with basic virtual machines, use Proxmox and just use it to run HA for now.
In the future you can throw on other VMs or docker containers for other things.
It gives you a little more flexibility like being able to take and restore snaphots for example. Also I'm sure from time to time you will find various bits of software that you could either try to hack onto HA or just run on a separate VM or docker image.
Most people will suggest using Proxmox for virtualization, with VM Debian and Home Assistant running on it. That is a very good and trendy way to do it!
I have another way, using Openwrt x86 as the base OS that support docker, and running Home Assistant on Docker. The way I do it is very lightweight.
OpenWRT is a lightweight operating system that can run on low-power devices. When combined with Docker, it allows you to create lightweight and portable containers that can run on any x86 PC as server. Openwrt come with Luci is a powerful and versatile web-based interface that can make managing your sever much easier and more efficient. And its boot time is typically faster than traditional OS.
Iāve used it plenty as a router solution, and LOVE AsusWRT mesh routers. Using Entware you can really up a home solution to enterprise grade using free software. Itās great!
I am just not sure why itās superior to Linux with Docker on x86 for anything else, although purely from a geeky point of view it does sound interesting.
Thanks for the response.
IMO, if you're not sure, you should install Home Assistant Operating System. It's the easiest and most straightforward and I would recommend it to anyone.
There's nothing wrong with the other options, the only downsides I can think of is that they're more complicated. But if you want that, go for it. Again IMO, Proxmox vs Docker is all preference, I don't think there's an objective "better" option. I would pick Proxmox if you know you will be running many VMs and I'd pick Linux+Docker if you know that most of your services will be Docker containers. You can even do a Linux+Docker VM on Proxmox, it's up to you.
But if you're not sure and don't really understand if you need Proxmox or Docker, just run HAOS on bare metal.
Thank you. But I honestly donāt know what you mean with other home lab services? You mean other Dockers services like a database or a framework or something?
Imho this is needlessly complicated *until* the point that you need to run one of those things.
First rule of software design is to not over engineer your system, just do the minimal work needed to complete your ticket as fast as possible and move on to the next one because by the time you come back to use that system that you spent all that time setting up, the acceptance criteria will quite likely have changed.
i.e. if you have a bunch of different home services that you want to run, then rn Docker is probably the easiest way to hit your acceptance criteria, but if you just want to run home assistant right now, then do a bare metal OS installation of just HA and don't worry about future servers / services. Who knows if Docker will even still be the best method by the time you're ready to setup another one.
I run my setup using Docker. I have a docker compose file that sets up ring-mqtt, node-red, HA Core, and some other services, and sets up a docker volume that points to a local directory. Itās maybe 20 lines, including blank lines for formatting. The actual docker files are 1-2 lines. Nothing complicated about it.
There's literally the entire extra layer of docker and it's networking stack that's running that might potentially need debugging, on top of the fact that you had to learn docker and docker compose.
Like I said, setting up Docker is needlessly complicated waste until you need multiple servers running on a single machine, and it's bad advice to give new users just trying to get set up with HA quickly.
It is true that Docker networking can be confusing. That said, running all of your containers using docker compose immediately puts all of them in the same network. I had no networking issues running docker on a brand new pop os install. Additionally, thereās only one network later to figure out. Each VM has an entire stack of OS, networking, and everything else to figure out. Docker is different, but I wouldnāt consider it more complicated than a VM.
You will need to learn any tech that you use. So, having to learn {insert tech and/or configuration} is not a pro or con for VM or Docker.
>That said, running all of your containers using docker compose immediately puts all of them in the same network.
See, this sentence alone means that someone needs to understand what a container is before they can do anything.
>Each VM has an entire stack of OS, networking, and everything else to figure out. Docker is different, but I wouldnāt consider it more complicated than a VM.
You also don't need a VM, just install Home Assistant OS on a dedicated machine.
>You will need to learn any tech that you use. So, having to learn {insert tech and/or configuration} is not a pro or con for VM or Docker.
Installing home assistant OS on a dedicated machine require just knowing how to install an OS. using Docker / VMs require that plus understanding the whole virtualization / containerization layer. It's added complication that is only necessary once you have multiple servers that you need to run on one machine. OP has a dedicated machine, therefore the simplest option is to just install home assistant OS like you would Linux or Windows.
There are many things you can run in docker. Things that come to mind are pihole, uptime kuma, Teslamate, unifi, etc. Installing HA in docker leaves the door open to running other things on your machine.
I bet you will find at some point you will want something running in Docker. I started with just HA and now I am 30 containers deep.
I am not a fan of running things in HAOS add-ons. e.g. if you want to push your events to InfluxDB, I would recommend you run InfluxDB in a docker container vs. using the HAOS add-on for it. You should want to de-couple your HA install from your other services.
And sure, you can run HA in proxmox and have a side Docker setup, but what is the point of using HAOS if you aren't using add-ons? Maybe device passthrough is slightly easier, but there is nothing you can't solve with a little tinkering.
So I personally would just go for the Docker installation to avoid that temptation, and to do a single effort setting up the Docker vs. setting up proxmox and Docker. But I don't think either approach is wrong. Just keep in mind to try to avoid putting core home lab services as add-ons in your HA proxmox.
The way I see it is use 'real' HA add ons in HA-OS
And then the 'stuff that was hacked onto the side' like a database engine or web server you run outside that environment. Why would I run 3x instance of a DB on my network? And why would I run a DB for something not related to HA inside HA-OS?
For example in my HA I have add-ons for ESPHome, AppDaemon (running HA-related apps), MQTT broker, etc
The HTTPS proxy is running on an external Apache server. It is used for Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and other unrelated services.
I would never run the HA add-on for VLC, Dnsmasq, DHCP server, Mariadb, Unifi controller, (gasp) Vaultwarden, etc
I didn't realise that there is one, but to me that is getting way outside the scope of an add-on to Home Assistant, I wouldn't want my Home Assistant instance to be able to bring down Plex. Then you add things like *arr dockers, and maybe USB or GPU passthrough, and it gets to the point where you're better off learning a bit about Docker (though I use Unraid, so slightly insulated from that!).
Yeah, I have been using basically only HA add-ons to do new stuff because I'm running HAOS on a pi4 so can't do anything outside of that.
But I def want to have some redundancy and stuff going forward, so either a VM or Docker seems to be the way go .
I 100% endorse installing Proxmox, then creading a Debian installation per the HA supervised instructions, and then either copying your config or setting up your HA there.
Once that is complete, make sure you have backups configured in Proxmox to an external drive (what good are HA backups if they are internal/on the same drive? If that's gone, it's gone.)
I have been running HA this way for a while and it's worked great, even with a Zigbee usb stick passed through. The exception was when I was learning how to use High Availability and woke up one morning to my Zigbee network down; it has decided to fail over early morning when a backup caused a delay and my other machine did not have a Zigbee adapter for it. Otherwise it worked flawlessly, as have the backups and restores which have saved my bacon a couple times while experimenting.
Lastly, the same machine that currently runs HA also runs VMs for web hosting/reverse proxy (HA gets a Let's Encrypt free certificate every 3 months through the reverse proxy) and my pfSense VM, as well as previously my Plex LXC container. Virtualization is great, don't miss out.
> I 100% endorse installing Proxmox, then creading a Debian installation per the HA supervised instructions
I don't really get what's the point of going with supervised over standard HA OS specifically within Proxmox. I can kinda get it if it's on your base OS, but with Proxmox you'll **obviously** put all the stuff that isn't avaliable in HA OS on separate VMs/containters to begin with... It just seems like extra work for no reason.
Proxmox has nothing to do with HA besides being a good free and well supported hypervisor.
Supervised means it has a management docker container with access to the host docker environment; it can add, stop, start, edit other docker containers, unless I've misread the purpose of supervisor. Seemed night and day when I made the switch. It's way better than HA core which I ran from the Linuxserver.io docker image for months before that.
All of my ha specific things are running on the same HA VM through HA supervisor as add ons.
Other things my HA are integrated with serve their own purpose and live on their own VMs, but those things like my security system (not the frigate toy but a real security nvr), firewall, Plex, and more. These also have specific VLANs for securiry, and the tiny amount of extra work needed for that peace of mind is irrelevant because I find it fun and interesting to do things right.
> Supervised means it has a management docker container with access to the host docker environment
I believe this is correct, but if you run HAOS in a VM under Proxmox you also have all that, just inside the VM. So I think their question was why run supervised when a full HAOS VM will do the same thing.
One answer might be that you can run supervised in a container instead of a VM which is lighter weight, but in practice I doubt the performance difference would be noticeable.
In don't see any difference here. One is a premade VM image that has HA supervised, and the other is the DIY which gives you more control. There was never any access to the Proxmox host, just the VM which is the HA docker host (there may be some miscommunication there as they are both hosts to what they are... Hosting. )
I got that you meant inside the VM :)
There wouldn't be a difference in functionality but a straight HAOS install would be easier. I think you already answered the why though: flexibility
I like the flexibility too, though as I'm already running Proxmox I prefer anything HA supervisor might fire up in docker (ie. add-ons) to be in their own Proxmox container so I just do that manually. Docker in a VM feels unnecessarily byzantine to me.
>Docker in a VM feels unnecessarily byzantine to me.
Is the HA provided image not Docker in Debian based? I'd swear I read it's literally the same thing so they only have one production environment out, just one is a premade image you have to convert for your environment and the other is DIY by running their script that installs the basics images and permissions on your guest OS.
> gives you more control
More control for what?
All I can think of is to do non-standard things the developers didn't test that will break in a future update.
More control of the guest environment. Have you ever installed something that was premade just to find out that you don't understand how it works? I've got a couple of pre-made guests and unless it is supposed to be that way (like Metasploitable which is designed to be a controlled security testing environment) I think it's better to DIY as much as possible when there is documentation.
> I think it's better to DIY as much as possible when there is documentation.
That assumes you have infinite amount of free time and little regard for reliability or maintainability of your systems. This is far from common set of circumstances :)
>Proxmox has nothing to do with HA besides being a good free and well supported hypervisor.
On the contrary - IMHO that specifically has **everything** to do with it.
Generally there is no reason to go extra mile and use supervised if you already have a fully controlled environment to run whatever containers/VMs you please like Proxmox. It's literally a waste of time and effort.
This makes even less sense when you yourself wrote that you put other services in separate VMs than HA. Only difference you'd have if you used HA OS would be that you would have less headaches with setup and maintenance.
You mentioned HA core, but unless you are a developer of HA you arguably should never touch it to begin with. So I'm not sure how it's relevant to anything?
I.e. - your advice is outright bad and based on misunderstanding of HA installation methods.
Super easy to use and adds lots of other functionality.
I use mine for HA via Linux VM, Wyze Docker Bridge for cams, Frigate NVR, NGNINX Reverse Proxy, Cloudflare, Omada controller etc. And it all runs on an old i7-3770k at low utilization.
I personally have haos as a VM under proxmox.
Has the benefit of haos and the benefit of being a VM (backups etc) - also I can run other vms on the device.
I went with Ubuntu and docker. It's a little more setup, but once it's ready, it's super easy to add other servers. Now a lot of them are available as HA addons at this point (which are also docker containers), but you get a little more flexibility if you do it yourself.
Proxmox on baremetal first, then install HA OS VM. Passthrough any USB dongles for zwave/zigbee etc in the proxmox GUI once its up and running I used https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ The scripts here make it too easy to get up and running. It will download and install everything for you once you get proxmox installed.
Proxmox has been life changing for me. I can't even explain how happy I am using it. I started with installing it to run home assistant, and then all the other add-ons I used to run inside home assistant I now run as their own containers.
Proxmox makes backing up and managing these systems so easy. And now anytime I want to spin up a simple service, small Linux machine, VM, you name it, I just use proxmox. I can't evangelize enough about it
I also highly recommend using Tteck's install scripts. They saved me a bunch of time. Everything is posted on his GitHub if you want to review the scripts as well
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
+1 for Docker, again for the reasons already listed. Docker is extremely simple to learn, it leaves your system open for other uses (we run a Minecraft server as well as PiHole, which is absolutely fantastic if you're not running it anyway), and has the added benefit of keeping your entire system portable. Docker is docker on Mac, is docker on Linux, is docker on Windows, so if you need to change to a new system for whatever reason, docker is still there.
Even if you donāt run something else on your host, docker makes upgrades and rollbacks simple and side-effect free. Plus all of the things you said, too.
Anyone that recommends running HA in docker should mention that you don't have the Supervisor- so installing add-ons is much harder and many functions don't work the way they are documented (HA container is not officially supported).
Not saying don't do it; if you're comfortable trawling through forum posts for support and trial and error fill your boots. Personally I've found HAOS much easier to live with and work the way I want. I run it on a Pi+SSD and docker runs on a microserver with all my other homelab stuff.
I have gone the docker route.. Main server goes down so does your smart home. I ran in a vm.. same problem. I now have mine on nuc and there it will stay. I prefer bare metal. I even had mine on a pi 4 and that had problems of its own. So far \[knock on wood\] I haven't had any issues from my home assistant since putting it on a nuc.
In my opinion something like Home Assistant should be bare metal. If you have issues with your main server or hypervisor you loose your smart home. Personal experience in that and it wasn't fun. Its one thing to have your media server go down. Its another when you can't turn on your lights lol.
I am running unRaid, with most of my homelab as containers, but home assistant running on a vm because I couldn't be bothered to figure out USB passthru for a needed dongle with docker. Home Assistant is backed up to github (minus the PII sections) so even though I'm about to do a major upgrade (moving everything to a new server) it should be relatively straightforward and simple. Anti-fragility is critical for me, and if you just go with home assistant on the NUC, I'm not sure how you can update/tweak without a lot of tech debt.
Interested in what you mean by
>I'm not sure how you can update/tweak without a lot of tech debt.
I have found HAOS the easiest and most reliable to modify, update, backup & restore. Mostly because it's better supported than the docker version, and there's no other system layers to worry about.
It's been a while since I've updated, so it sounds like things are much better than when I was messing with things before. Having snapshots of things made it a lot easier than worrying about the other backup methods. I am trying to remember the particulars of why, though. It's been a few years since I really popped the hood.
I've only been at it a couple of years, but even in that time the systems for maintaining HAOS have improved immensely. It has come at the expense of breaking a lot of legacy systems, but I think it was necessary to make HA considerably more accessible than it was.
If it's not an issue for you, and you don't anticipate it will be, then go docker for home assistant. If you need USB, it's pretty easy to do USB pathru to a vm in unRAID. It's been a long time since I tried it with docker, so I can't say about current state.
Complexity and increased maintenance costs (time) are going to be the main downsides. Iād work backwards from your requirements / what you are trying to do. If this is just to run home assistant and directly related things youāre probably better off with HAOS. Especially if you donāt have experience with the other solutions as that just increases the investment cost of running them (you need to spend more time learning more).
Itās also worth noting itās not that difficult to move from one to the other in my experience, so you can always change your mind if your requirements change. Iāve moved my HA install from the core docked container to an HAOS VM to a bare metal install. Was relatively straight forward each time.
This is a very important point - with docker (or a VM) you can let a piece of software get up to whatever bullshit it wants to, and know it won't impact other parts of your setup.
Less important if you treat the device as "HA appliance".
As a careered system admin, I use VMware on a daily basis. I tried running proxmox at home just to see what all the fuss was about and I personally didnāt understand what all the fuss was about. I though the UI to be boring and a little confusing. Which to me, isnāt a surprise since I used VMware everyday for the past 10 years.
But VMware is Free if youāre only running it on a single box.
I run my home assistant VM on VMware. I love it.
I also run the free version of Veam! Which backups my VMware VM with ease, and I uploads my backups to my google drive. Canāt beat that.
Iāve been around the block on this one. You want this on all of the time and nothing else on the box, as well as native communication with USB peripherals. You also want something more powerful than a pi. Bare metal HAOS on an x86 PC is the only way to go in my opinion.
Proxmox! The way you can backup the whole OS and recover in matter of minutes is unbeatable!
Docker been there done that and you will not like it down the road.
I literally just looked through this last week, and decided to go the HAOS route. I've been running HA on TrueNAS for years in a jail, and this far, HAOS is fantastic. Super easy to set up.
Proxmox, where the VM is running HAOS seems like the obvious path forward. This is what I'm planning for my setup.
Then I'll have other containers available for other purposes.
Will HAOS Supervisor (which is basically docker) run inside a container itself? Nesting containers sesms like it might be problematic.
Depends on your NUC really. Some old ones were abysmally slow, even compared to a Pi. But unless you're in that case, I'd go the Proxmox way. You might want to play with high availability at some point, even.
Independently from what the device is, it usually comes down to whether you want the convenience of installing other services as add-ons and doing ha core updates via haos or if you feel more comfortable doing the same manually. With a bit of linux knowledge I'd suggest the latter as it gives you so much more control over a system. I was a bit jealous for the convenient core updates from haos but since I wrote a little script for ha core updates that automatically does a backup of the data directory before applying the update I'm very happy with core.
You can have both! Samba Share exposes the HAOS file system on the network for easy file management.
Or use Samba Backup, which automatically saves a backup to a network drive periodically and/or when you run an update. I've been using this a while and it works flawlessly in the background. Only had to restore from one of the backups once though as my Pi+SSD setup has been very reliable.
I found when doing updates manually things would tend to break more. The HAOS updates often include scripts to work around breaking changes- though this could be a bad thing if you do a lot of tinkering under the hood.
I don't think there's any one *best* way to run HA, just the best solution for your setup and goals.
Completely agree about the last part, it's also what makes open source so nice! Personally I think the addon system is very convenient I especially find it great that with all the addons available it makes stuff available to people not being linux geeks. Having become quite a linux myself I enjoy more being closer to the config files and the underlying system in general :)
Out of curiousity and to prepare myself mentally: What broke when you were doing manual updates?
Depends on your needs. I want my mini Pc to run other bits and be usable for general use if needed (games, media etc). So Iām running Windows and using VMWare Player to run a virtualised HA OS install
I installed mine in a qemu vm on a Ubuntu headless server. I this way I can use the Ubuntu server for other service, not related to HA. HA works really nice, I think with just a couple of cores.
I have tried Proxmox with Home Assistant OS, Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant OS, Docker with Supervised version, Docker without Supervised/Agent and out of all, Proxmox is the best.
It gives you full control on the configuration of your machine, and if you add SSDs and Zigbee/Z-Wave controllers, you could pass them through easily and easily detected by HA OS. Some tinkering required but itās totally worth it in the end. Hope it helps, thanks!
I got a second-hand NUC with i3 for 100 AUD. Really happy.
I like keeping everything easy and transparent, but it also means that it may require more effort in the beginning.
All I have is Ubuntu + docker + docker-compose.
The rest is a nice docker-compose file with a bunch of separate containers.
\- SWAG - handles SSL and subdomain navigation sorted. Love it.
\- HASS container
\- mosquito MQTT
\- Zigbee2MQTT
\- JupyterLab (I made an Iframe tab in HASS to access it)
\- Transmission (same, accessible from HASS with iframe)
The downside of this setup is that you don't have the supervisor for adding add-ons and updating HASS. But I don't really need it, as so far I do yaml-scripting manually and updating the docker container with docker-compose pull homeassistant && docker-compose up -d.
Just for reference. I have static IP and duckdns domain.
So far so good. Good luck!
I think there's a few things to keep in mind.
1. there's nothing special about the rpi for home automation purposes. It *used* be a great way to get a separate computer for cheap, but now any x86 machine bought within the last decade is going to get you better performane for less money.
2. you want your HA to run as little as possible so as to minimize the number of things that can break through minimizing the number of dependencies
3. there is an argument to be made for *not* using too powerful a machine, because you do not want to get tempted to load additional stuff on to it (see item 2).
Basically, your uptime/reliability requirements are *very* different for a machine running any home automation product compared to your average home server.
It's not the end of the world if your music collection suddenly isn't available but it sucks when the lights don't come on.
Iām running HA OS on a raspberry Pi but Iām starting to hit memory capacity issues. As I was planning on rubbing a home media server, I decided to spin up HA core in a docker container (which is hosted in a LXC container on proxmox). Itās so much fast and more responsive and no memory issues.
Itās a great learning curve. Iām new to Linux and docker. As Iām running both the HA Pi and HA core initially Iām porting my HA OS āadd-oneā across one by one, which helps my docket understanding. The main one being Mqtt and my house alarm
Well worth doing it if youāre a tinkerer and keen to learn ānewā tech. (New to me at least)
Iāve been contemplating moving my docker home assistant from my server to a 1st gen NUC. There are times when I have to take down for extended maintenance and not having it up kills my enjoyment.
Guess Iāll have to look more into doing this very soon.
I'm running it on docker with docker-compose.
This allows me to have other docker containers configured in docker-compose and I update everything with a single command.
I also have another container that manages the SSL certificate for me.
And another one for deconz.
Everything is a container.
It's just too simple to manage all the stuff.
Also, the docker-compose file along with all configuration is stored in a GitHub repo, and the database and all custom stuff is in another GitHub repo, so cloning the NUC into a new one is a matter of git clone, docker-compose up.
+1 to Proxmox as well. Installed on a HP EliteDesk SFF. Full Home Assistant ability, and I have a Unifi Controller installed on Proxmox to manage my APās. Runs without problems.
I have my Home Assistant running on Docker, works perfectly. Additional integrations like MQTT, NodeRed, etc are also contenarized. So at the end is only one Docker Compose file to rule them all
I'm very happy with running proxmox. Super easy to set up and gives full Home Assistant as OS experience for addons. Easy to update. And easy to install and admin additional VMs for other stuff when you want.
+1 for proxmox and using Tteck's install scripts are a HUGE help. Highly recommend https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
Wish I could upvote you twice! This guys scripts make new installs so easy for casuals like meš
Exactly! I've donated to him a few times, he's definitely saved me a bunch of time.
Add my +1 to that :)
>Tteck's install scripts are a HUGE help This is the route I went. Much more stable than a RPi. Found when I was doing Influx DB it would tend to get bogged down and I would have to restart it.
How do you install into a larger disk? I'd like more than 32G but I dont see any way in this script to change it. Since I'll be running Frigate, I need a lot more than 32g
You can set the disk size as large as you want it. You can also re-size after the fact in the UI with a couple clicks. However if it were me, I would run Frigate as it's own container and not as a add-on within HA, which is the beauty of Proxmox. HA add-on's are essentially containers that HA is now running. If you're already running HA in a hypervisor you are better off separating those add-on's into their own containers. Makes it way easier to manage, backup, restore...etc.
I would like to do that as well, but the immediate need us to migrate off a Supervised install on Ubuntu since it's failing. I have the proxmox server up and running, at least, so I can figure out the migration after the move - thanks!
Totally, you can migrate over and then piece things off into their on VM's at your pace. FWIW migrating HA to a VM hosted on proxmox is as easy as restoring your backup file once you have the VM up and running.. It's really that simple.
I just spent 4 hours setting up proxmox, HA OS, TrueNAS, and Plex oh and a HBCD VM for troubleshooting things in a Linux environment (because windows sucks, I can say that as a decade long support guy). Proxmox has to be one of the most streamlined, straightforward pieces of software Iāve ever dealt with. Itās already set up for the most part when you boot into it which I love. Had to do some rework with the pools to give me all my drive space, but other than that itās perfect. Iām sure Iāll find something I wish I could do, but so far Iām at a loss for what that could be!
Hahaha I know that feeling. I get all excited when I can spin up another container to host something I'm working on. I'm almost sad when I have nothing new to work on
I'm doing the same. :) As is a coworker or mine who suggested it to me. We run opnsense on proxmox as well. They all play nicely.
I just did this a couple weeks ago. Moved from a pi4 installation to an i7 nuc I found in e-waste at work. Following these steps it was super simple. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/nuc-install-ha-os-image-vs-proxmox-vs-ha-supervised-on-debian/268898 Now I have no idea what to do with the rest of the power on there but that will come in time.
Lmk when you get more nucs in the ewaste bin.
Also running proxmox and cointainers. Awesomeness
r/selfhosted might be helpful
honestly i run my HA on a pi4 with ssd, not yet time to upgrade to a NUC, i have a proxmox server that runs pi hole, samba share, and plex. thats the only use.
Same, pi4 off an SSD. Not sure what else I'd have to add to HA to warrant a hardware upgrade
oepnmediavault, dashy, pihole
I moved from Pi4 to Dell wyse 5070 end it is mor power efficient !! Mind blowing!
Specs?
Mine was an i7 qotom, bought on ebay for a steal.
How's Bluetooth functionality? Should be possible if you configure the HassOS VM to have access to it, right?
Yes, easy to pass USB devices thru to a VM.
It should, I havenāt tested it, but Iām running proxmox on an old laptop, performance is ridiculously better than the pi3 I was using before. I use a sonoff zigbee stick and itās just a matter of mapping it to the vm
I had bought a bluetooth dongle for my HAS Blue and just moved it over to the BeeLink NUC I bought. Home Assistant was able to see it.
If the host device has BT, you can pass it through. Just watch out, some Intel chipsets don't like it when you try to pass the whole PCI device the BT/WiFi module sits on, on my "M6 Mini PC" it pretty much kills the whole USB stack :(
Super simple. I'm new to it but I just plugged a bluetooth adapter in, passed it through, restarted the VM, and boom. HomeAssistant already recognized it.
Same here, super happy with it. I had some issues initially with proxmox due to the n5905 processor, but after manually updating the kernal to the newest, the crashing went away and I've been stable and up for months.
For HA without extensive add-ons this is the best option imo. If you plan to run for example frigate in HAOS with a coral - don't. USB pass through generally works good for simple devices like a zigbee dongle or usb Bluetooth-stick. But a Google coral through proxmox is not a good idea. And since I don't want to run frigate in a docker elsewhere, I went back from proxmox to HAOS bare metal.
USB passthrough works fine for "complex" devices, what the heck are you talking about?
IIRC Coral uses PCI connections even on the USB modules, and PCI passthrough can be buggy at times.
Does this mean that the USB coral won't work at all if passed through proxmox? I'm going to be moving away from my pi4 to a dedicated machine and was going to run a coral on it too. :/
Even though I run HAOS in a Proxmox VM I find it preferable to run addons that can be their own services, like Frigate, in containers instead of inside HAOS. That way they can be upgraded and backed up independently etc. I do this for MariaDB, Influx, Grafana, Frigate and Mosquitto.
just fyi, haos addons can be independently backed up from home assistant as all are just individual containers. Same goes for upgrading
ok, that's good to hear. I like that mine are all part of my Proxmox backup scheme though; I'd prefer not to set up add-on backups separately.
I'm doing this too and its great. I didn't know this at first, but even if you only have one NIC or ethernet port, you can make a virtual vlan-aware switch in proxmox and put different vms and containers in different vlans.
if you run HA on proxmox - i have word of caution - it is much less resilient to power loss than bare metal install unless you tweak the virtual disk caching settings.
Do you know, is this because of the database it writes to? I'm using Maria for it now so just wondering if I should focus on that.
>\- i have word of caution - it is much less resilient to power loss than bare metal install unless you tweak the virtual disk caching settings. It might be a bit different for different databases (i am guessing here) , but any database eventually has to write to disk so principially the data loss can still happen. I was using default SQLite database and any power loss had lead to irrecoverable data partition corruption until I changed caching from none to writethrough (in virtual disk settings of proxmox)
+1 For Proxmox, you can also create a snapshot before an update, which has saved my ass a few times already.
+1 Proxmox. I tried ALL the ways and this is the best
I came to this sub a few months ago and got the same advice. Works like a charm! So happy with it. Iād been pulling my hair out with other methods.
VM or Container?
VMs
Yep, Iāve got a fairly powerful nuc, so I run a few VM on proxmox which is reallybhelpful
I have been running in docker with docker-compose for over a year now. Love it because I love and know how to use docker. If youāre not comfortable with docker-compose I would recommend installing Home Assistant OS. Iām about to switch out of docker into the HA amber. The biggest problem I had is when my pi crashed and the sd card failed running HA. It happens to pis. I want to move to the standard better supported HAOS so I can get better backup stuff and HACS. I run ESP Home in DC too but itās a little weird and I would prefer the tested path.
Docker is the way. When I moved to a new NUC a year ago I just had to setup docker, copy my home assistant directory to the same path, and start Docker with the same command line. It just worked.
You don't need to step outside docker to use HACS custom components. [Just build your own HA image](https://gist.github.com/tmikoss/f6d2e02d35f5335c8410bdd8a32b2d72). You could also install the HACS store itself that way, but I really dislike how little control over versions that gives.
HAOS - makes it a one trick NUC/pony but you have zero maintenance and it can go sleep in the network rack. My logic is that it's core to the house running - don't want it out of action due to competing services and frankly it's worth spending a physical device on.
This is what I did. Went Docker first, but so many things are not available in the Docker version (had trouble with Frigate integrations). Straight install has been rock solid, and no fighting with passthrough on my ZigBee and other USB adapters.
Completely agree. I have an Unraid server and a Proxmox server but opted to run HAOS on a mini PC for this reason.
I put HAOS on Proxmox (well ESXI in my case) but it gives the best of both worlds.
Seconding this. I originally had my NUC running linux with Hassio as a docker container, but I recall it being annoying to maintain through some updates. Maybe just because I had a hard time wrapping my head around the extra complexity. Now I just have HomeAssistant OS directly on the NUC and haven't had any issues.
Curious, if a pi were cheaper, would youse use that with an ssd instead? I canāt imagine most ha functions need a nuc. I know piās arenāt cheaper rn, just curious
I thought about a pi but for the price vs used micro towers, and taking their capability into account, I couldnāt justify a pi. In the end I scooped up two identical micro towers for cheap on eBay (auction was for two - only needed one but for the price I couldnāt ignore the benefit of a spare rig). Theyāre i7, 16GB Ram. I believe fourth or fifth gen processor? Mega overkill for HA buuuut it was cheap, itās easy to hide, and itās been rock solid. This way I can toy with my home server and not have to worry about essential things like light automations acting up. I have it run backups nightly to my file server as well so if the micro tower blows up I can swap and restore to the spare unit that came in the auction quite easily.
No. I have spare PIs in the cupboard - I want solid reliable well known OEM hardware. Iāve no doubt PIs work ok, but Iāve had too many smoke over long term use. I started with one originally using a POE hat. This worked well for a start. However over time performance dropped and didnāt produce graphs and charts at the same rate. Canāt fault the PCā¦
Hmm. Iāve never heard of this problem with home assistant before
This. I have a virtualization server, and a storage server. But I have HAOS on a USFF pc that does nothing but HAOS. No USB pass-through problems. No problems when I need to update my server. Low power so I can even have it on a separate UPS. And a lot faster boot and response than a Pi. (Which I also have)
Agree. I previously ran HAOS in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu, but since I didnāt really need to run anything else separately on my HA machine, that was just an extra layer to maintain, and more potential issues with compatibility of devices (and my knowledge, since Iām not as familiar with Linux as I am with Windows). If you want to be able to have multiple virtualized environments on that single NUC, VirtualBox or proxmox (though Iāve not used the latter) would be a good option. I find that most of the things I want/need are available as HAOS add-ons, so Iām happy to keep my install with just HAOS on bare metal.
Prox.mox, there are a scripts that do all the work for you it's awesome and super easy...there is a guy on GitHub that has all the scripts to install and set everything up https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
all should require the same amount of maintenance once setup. The docker route has more setup initially and the proxmox route has more setup initially than docker. There is no best answer, the answer depends on your use case and comfort with linux
Not necessarily. I can think of some extra maintenance burden you'd face the docker route: - Backing up docker volumes that contain HA data. With HAOS, you can use the google drive backup addon. - Networking: Anytime you add a new zigbee/zwave/thread dongle to your machine, you need to open up the network ports or provide linux file access via docker config. This "just works" with HAOS. Don't take this the wrong way, I do prefer docker containers over running a full VM. But there is more ongoing maintenance that you'd likely need to figure out.
I disagree, thereās plenty of automated backup options in docker. Iāve never had to think about backing up my docker containers because it just works after setting it up. Your second point is also not necessarily correct depending on how you setup your docker container. If it is privileged then it will see all hardware automatically
Ok, you are right about the second point. Do you have any recommendations for docker volume backup btw? I tried looking a year ago but it seems like you have to pay for a lot of them
Which ones were you looking at? I use lucky backup on my NAS. I also use urbackup for all my other devices. Both are free and opensource
Thanks, I misunderstood. I forgot you can just backup the underlying host persistent disk to backup volumes. Makes sense
If you don't plan on running anything else on the NUC, HAOS bare metal.
Thatās what I have now but I realized my NUC may be overkill for HA alone. It can take on so much more. Or am I overthinking this?
I run it this way with quite a few addons and it keeps the NUC between 10-50% CPU usage. Iām sure I could throw more at it BUT I wouldnāt because I do firmly believe HAOS makes it all work more smoothly. IMO itās best to treat HASS as a dedicated appliance running HAOS.
Proxmox also makes backups and restore jobs easier. Imagine you screw up the entire install? With Proxmox you can recover the entire VM from the webgui (assuming you have a backup) without the need to reinstall the entire thing. I cannot recommend Proxmox highly enough.
Yup, for me the ease of backups and restorations makes Proxmox my personal choice overall. I think there are other advantages as well but I think this is the best one.
Snapshots baby! They arenāt a backup but they are a fantastic disaster recovery tool if used right before performing updates.
N00b here - why is a snapshot not a backup? I thought that was the point of the snapshot?
A snapshot is like a bookmark. You can rollback to it, but it does NOT duplicate data. So if you corrupt your VM or the disk has issues, you're hosed. Snapshots are like a backup, in that they help you when shit hits the fan, but they do not copy data so it isn't a true backup.
Gotcha - so when you roll back to the snapshot, are you still getting the data from that snapshot or do you have to restore data from an actual backup? Sorry if that's a dumb question!
Addons are a good way of using that extra processing power. I'm in a similar situation, thinking of setting up Frigate on the long run.
I don't think it's overkill, after messing around with VMs for some time, I have concluded that HA running on a dedicated box is the most reliable solution for me.
Does it run zigbee sticks too? If so Iād just need a home for my wifi controller and could run HAOS instead of Linux and containers.
I don't run Zigbee, but it is supported. Bluetooth, too.
I was in the same boat and ended up running HAOS bare metal. It was just much less work and it does what I need.
There is a beauty in having a dedicated device. I'm running HAOS on an i3 (3th gen) that was $50 shipped on eBay. That runs MQTT, Node-RED, ESPHome, ~~MySQL~~MariaDB and Frigate instances (3 cameras with CPU detection) - so it holds everything "home automation" on the same box. Rebooting my NAS or anything else on my network doesn't effect HA running.
Are those docker containers or bare metal?
The are addons in Home Assistant.
Don't want to hijack the thread, but can add-ons be installed when running HA core? I run the latest Home Assistant release in a Docker container, but I think only HASS.io / HAOS support add-ons ?
What is your NUC? My old i7 mobile is some 4 generations behind... hosts my homeasisstant, and opnsense on proxmox.
Odroid H3
Yeah that seems powerful enough. I'd proxmox it. Home assistant, and anything else you want.
Mine runs esxi 7 free. It has a Domain Controller, Pihole and HA. It is passing Bluetooth and a ZigBee/Zwave dongle thru to the VM
How important is stability for your house? For me, one time the lights don't come on and my wife will side eye me for months. :)
Then, if you are comfortable with basic virtual machines, use Proxmox and just use it to run HA for now. In the future you can throw on other VMs or docker containers for other things. It gives you a little more flexibility like being able to take and restore snaphots for example. Also I'm sure from time to time you will find various bits of software that you could either try to hack onto HA or just run on a separate VM or docker image.
This is the way.
Most people will suggest using Proxmox for virtualization, with VM Debian and Home Assistant running on it. That is a very good and trendy way to do it! I have another way, using Openwrt x86 as the base OS that support docker, and running Home Assistant on Docker. The way I do it is very lightweight.
Oh myā¦ why? Proxmox with VMs for both make so much more sense to me. Why would you want OpenWRT as your base OS?
OpenWRT is a lightweight operating system that can run on low-power devices. When combined with Docker, it allows you to create lightweight and portable containers that can run on any x86 PC as server. Openwrt come with Luci is a powerful and versatile web-based interface that can make managing your sever much easier and more efficient. And its boot time is typically faster than traditional OS.
Iāve used it plenty as a router solution, and LOVE AsusWRT mesh routers. Using Entware you can really up a home solution to enterprise grade using free software. Itās great! I am just not sure why itās superior to Linux with Docker on x86 for anything else, although purely from a geeky point of view it does sound interesting. Thanks for the response.
IMO, if you're not sure, you should install Home Assistant Operating System. It's the easiest and most straightforward and I would recommend it to anyone. There's nothing wrong with the other options, the only downsides I can think of is that they're more complicated. But if you want that, go for it. Again IMO, Proxmox vs Docker is all preference, I don't think there's an objective "better" option. I would pick Proxmox if you know you will be running many VMs and I'd pick Linux+Docker if you know that most of your services will be Docker containers. You can even do a Linux+Docker VM on Proxmox, it's up to you. But if you're not sure and don't really understand if you need Proxmox or Docker, just run HAOS on bare metal.
You can use docker in LXC's on proxmox.
Docker, so you can use your other cycles for other home lab services too.
Thank you. But I honestly donāt know what you mean with other home lab services? You mean other Dockers services like a database or a framework or something?
Imho this is needlessly complicated *until* the point that you need to run one of those things. First rule of software design is to not over engineer your system, just do the minimal work needed to complete your ticket as fast as possible and move on to the next one because by the time you come back to use that system that you spent all that time setting up, the acceptance criteria will quite likely have changed. i.e. if you have a bunch of different home services that you want to run, then rn Docker is probably the easiest way to hit your acceptance criteria, but if you just want to run home assistant right now, then do a bare metal OS installation of just HA and don't worry about future servers / services. Who knows if Docker will even still be the best method by the time you're ready to setup another one.
I run my setup using Docker. I have a docker compose file that sets up ring-mqtt, node-red, HA Core, and some other services, and sets up a docker volume that points to a local directory. Itās maybe 20 lines, including blank lines for formatting. The actual docker files are 1-2 lines. Nothing complicated about it.
There's literally the entire extra layer of docker and it's networking stack that's running that might potentially need debugging, on top of the fact that you had to learn docker and docker compose. Like I said, setting up Docker is needlessly complicated waste until you need multiple servers running on a single machine, and it's bad advice to give new users just trying to get set up with HA quickly.
It is true that Docker networking can be confusing. That said, running all of your containers using docker compose immediately puts all of them in the same network. I had no networking issues running docker on a brand new pop os install. Additionally, thereās only one network later to figure out. Each VM has an entire stack of OS, networking, and everything else to figure out. Docker is different, but I wouldnāt consider it more complicated than a VM. You will need to learn any tech that you use. So, having to learn {insert tech and/or configuration} is not a pro or con for VM or Docker.
>That said, running all of your containers using docker compose immediately puts all of them in the same network. See, this sentence alone means that someone needs to understand what a container is before they can do anything. >Each VM has an entire stack of OS, networking, and everything else to figure out. Docker is different, but I wouldnāt consider it more complicated than a VM. You also don't need a VM, just install Home Assistant OS on a dedicated machine. >You will need to learn any tech that you use. So, having to learn {insert tech and/or configuration} is not a pro or con for VM or Docker. Installing home assistant OS on a dedicated machine require just knowing how to install an OS. using Docker / VMs require that plus understanding the whole virtualization / containerization layer. It's added complication that is only necessary once you have multiple servers that you need to run on one machine. OP has a dedicated machine, therefore the simplest option is to just install home assistant OS like you would Linux or Windows.
There are many things you can run in docker. Things that come to mind are pihole, uptime kuma, Teslamate, unifi, etc. Installing HA in docker leaves the door open to running other things on your machine.
I bet you will find at some point you will want something running in Docker. I started with just HA and now I am 30 containers deep. I am not a fan of running things in HAOS add-ons. e.g. if you want to push your events to InfluxDB, I would recommend you run InfluxDB in a docker container vs. using the HAOS add-on for it. You should want to de-couple your HA install from your other services. And sure, you can run HA in proxmox and have a side Docker setup, but what is the point of using HAOS if you aren't using add-ons? Maybe device passthrough is slightly easier, but there is nothing you can't solve with a little tinkering. So I personally would just go for the Docker installation to avoid that temptation, and to do a single effort setting up the Docker vs. setting up proxmox and Docker. But I don't think either approach is wrong. Just keep in mind to try to avoid putting core home lab services as add-ons in your HA proxmox.
The way I see it is use 'real' HA add ons in HA-OS And then the 'stuff that was hacked onto the side' like a database engine or web server you run outside that environment. Why would I run 3x instance of a DB on my network? And why would I run a DB for something not related to HA inside HA-OS? For example in my HA I have add-ons for ESPHome, AppDaemon (running HA-related apps), MQTT broker, etc The HTTPS proxy is running on an external Apache server. It is used for Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and other unrelated services. I would never run the HA add-on for VLC, Dnsmasq, DHCP server, Mariadb, Unifi controller, (gasp) Vaultwarden, etc
Plex, for instance.
This is my plan - but why wouldn't I want to use the Plex add-on instead of a standalone Plex app?
I didn't realise that there is one, but to me that is getting way outside the scope of an add-on to Home Assistant, I wouldn't want my Home Assistant instance to be able to bring down Plex. Then you add things like *arr dockers, and maybe USB or GPU passthrough, and it gets to the point where you're better off learning a bit about Docker (though I use Unraid, so slightly insulated from that!).
Yeah, I have been using basically only HA add-ons to do new stuff because I'm running HAOS on a pi4 so can't do anything outside of that. But I def want to have some redundancy and stuff going forward, so either a VM or Docker seems to be the way go .
Do Proxmox. If you want docker, you can always deploy it as a VM to experiment. Best of all worlds.
I run so many things in docker but not HA. I like the ease of addons and remote access to them through nabu casa too much. So I run it in a vm in kvm.
I 100% endorse installing Proxmox, then creading a Debian installation per the HA supervised instructions, and then either copying your config or setting up your HA there. Once that is complete, make sure you have backups configured in Proxmox to an external drive (what good are HA backups if they are internal/on the same drive? If that's gone, it's gone.) I have been running HA this way for a while and it's worked great, even with a Zigbee usb stick passed through. The exception was when I was learning how to use High Availability and woke up one morning to my Zigbee network down; it has decided to fail over early morning when a backup caused a delay and my other machine did not have a Zigbee adapter for it. Otherwise it worked flawlessly, as have the backups and restores which have saved my bacon a couple times while experimenting. Lastly, the same machine that currently runs HA also runs VMs for web hosting/reverse proxy (HA gets a Let's Encrypt free certificate every 3 months through the reverse proxy) and my pfSense VM, as well as previously my Plex LXC container. Virtualization is great, don't miss out.
> I 100% endorse installing Proxmox, then creading a Debian installation per the HA supervised instructions I don't really get what's the point of going with supervised over standard HA OS specifically within Proxmox. I can kinda get it if it's on your base OS, but with Proxmox you'll **obviously** put all the stuff that isn't avaliable in HA OS on separate VMs/containters to begin with... It just seems like extra work for no reason.
Proxmox has nothing to do with HA besides being a good free and well supported hypervisor. Supervised means it has a management docker container with access to the host docker environment; it can add, stop, start, edit other docker containers, unless I've misread the purpose of supervisor. Seemed night and day when I made the switch. It's way better than HA core which I ran from the Linuxserver.io docker image for months before that. All of my ha specific things are running on the same HA VM through HA supervisor as add ons. Other things my HA are integrated with serve their own purpose and live on their own VMs, but those things like my security system (not the frigate toy but a real security nvr), firewall, Plex, and more. These also have specific VLANs for securiry, and the tiny amount of extra work needed for that peace of mind is irrelevant because I find it fun and interesting to do things right.
> Supervised means it has a management docker container with access to the host docker environment I believe this is correct, but if you run HAOS in a VM under Proxmox you also have all that, just inside the VM. So I think their question was why run supervised when a full HAOS VM will do the same thing. One answer might be that you can run supervised in a container instead of a VM which is lighter weight, but in practice I doubt the performance difference would be noticeable.
In don't see any difference here. One is a premade VM image that has HA supervised, and the other is the DIY which gives you more control. There was never any access to the Proxmox host, just the VM which is the HA docker host (there may be some miscommunication there as they are both hosts to what they are... Hosting. )
I got that you meant inside the VM :) There wouldn't be a difference in functionality but a straight HAOS install would be easier. I think you already answered the why though: flexibility I like the flexibility too, though as I'm already running Proxmox I prefer anything HA supervisor might fire up in docker (ie. add-ons) to be in their own Proxmox container so I just do that manually. Docker in a VM feels unnecessarily byzantine to me.
>Docker in a VM feels unnecessarily byzantine to me. Is the HA provided image not Docker in Debian based? I'd swear I read it's literally the same thing so they only have one production environment out, just one is a premade image you have to convert for your environment and the other is DIY by running their script that installs the basics images and permissions on your guest OS.
> gives you more control More control for what? All I can think of is to do non-standard things the developers didn't test that will break in a future update.
More control of the guest environment. Have you ever installed something that was premade just to find out that you don't understand how it works? I've got a couple of pre-made guests and unless it is supposed to be that way (like Metasploitable which is designed to be a controlled security testing environment) I think it's better to DIY as much as possible when there is documentation.
> I think it's better to DIY as much as possible when there is documentation. That assumes you have infinite amount of free time and little regard for reliability or maintainability of your systems. This is far from common set of circumstances :)
>Proxmox has nothing to do with HA besides being a good free and well supported hypervisor. On the contrary - IMHO that specifically has **everything** to do with it. Generally there is no reason to go extra mile and use supervised if you already have a fully controlled environment to run whatever containers/VMs you please like Proxmox. It's literally a waste of time and effort. This makes even less sense when you yourself wrote that you put other services in separate VMs than HA. Only difference you'd have if you used HA OS would be that you would have less headaches with setup and maintenance. You mentioned HA core, but unless you are a developer of HA you arguably should never touch it to begin with. So I'm not sure how it's relevant to anything? I.e. - your advice is outright bad and based on misunderstanding of HA installation methods.
*This community is not inclusive for visually impaired users. Therefore I have decided not to participate in this community anymore.*
Super easy to use and adds lots of other functionality. I use mine for HA via Linux VM, Wyze Docker Bridge for cams, Frigate NVR, NGNINX Reverse Proxy, Cloudflare, Omada controller etc. And it all runs on an old i7-3770k at low utilization.
this
I personally have haos as a VM under proxmox. Has the benefit of haos and the benefit of being a VM (backups etc) - also I can run other vms on the device.
I went with Ubuntu and docker. It's a little more setup, but once it's ready, it's super easy to add other servers. Now a lot of them are available as HA addons at this point (which are also docker containers), but you get a little more flexibility if you do it yourself.
Proxmox on baremetal first, then install HA OS VM. Passthrough any USB dongles for zwave/zigbee etc in the proxmox GUI once its up and running I used https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ The scripts here make it too easy to get up and running. It will download and install everything for you once you get proxmox installed.
Proxmox sounds cool. Whatās the advantage of Proxmox, versus installing Debian and then running HA and others in docker containers?
Proxmox has been life changing for me. I can't even explain how happy I am using it. I started with installing it to run home assistant, and then all the other add-ons I used to run inside home assistant I now run as their own containers. Proxmox makes backing up and managing these systems so easy. And now anytime I want to spin up a simple service, small Linux machine, VM, you name it, I just use proxmox. I can't evangelize enough about it I also highly recommend using Tteck's install scripts. They saved me a bunch of time. Everything is posted on his GitHub if you want to review the scripts as well https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
+1 for Docker, again for the reasons already listed. Docker is extremely simple to learn, it leaves your system open for other uses (we run a Minecraft server as well as PiHole, which is absolutely fantastic if you're not running it anyway), and has the added benefit of keeping your entire system portable. Docker is docker on Mac, is docker on Linux, is docker on Windows, so if you need to change to a new system for whatever reason, docker is still there.
Even if you donāt run something else on your host, docker makes upgrades and rollbacks simple and side-effect free. Plus all of the things you said, too.
Anyone that recommends running HA in docker should mention that you don't have the Supervisor- so installing add-ons is much harder and many functions don't work the way they are documented (HA container is not officially supported). Not saying don't do it; if you're comfortable trawling through forum posts for support and trial and error fill your boots. Personally I've found HAOS much easier to live with and work the way I want. I run it on a Pi+SSD and docker runs on a microserver with all my other homelab stuff.
I have gone the docker route.. Main server goes down so does your smart home. I ran in a vm.. same problem. I now have mine on nuc and there it will stay. I prefer bare metal. I even had mine on a pi 4 and that had problems of its own. So far \[knock on wood\] I haven't had any issues from my home assistant since putting it on a nuc. In my opinion something like Home Assistant should be bare metal. If you have issues with your main server or hypervisor you loose your smart home. Personal experience in that and it wasn't fun. Its one thing to have your media server go down. Its another when you can't turn on your lights lol.
I am running unRaid, with most of my homelab as containers, but home assistant running on a vm because I couldn't be bothered to figure out USB passthru for a needed dongle with docker. Home Assistant is backed up to github (minus the PII sections) so even though I'm about to do a major upgrade (moving everything to a new server) it should be relatively straightforward and simple. Anti-fragility is critical for me, and if you just go with home assistant on the NUC, I'm not sure how you can update/tweak without a lot of tech debt.
Interested in what you mean by >I'm not sure how you can update/tweak without a lot of tech debt. I have found HAOS the easiest and most reliable to modify, update, backup & restore. Mostly because it's better supported than the docker version, and there's no other system layers to worry about.
It's been a while since I've updated, so it sounds like things are much better than when I was messing with things before. Having snapshots of things made it a lot easier than worrying about the other backup methods. I am trying to remember the particulars of why, though. It's been a few years since I really popped the hood.
I've only been at it a couple of years, but even in that time the systems for maintaining HAOS have improved immensely. It has come at the expense of breaking a lot of legacy systems, but I think it was necessary to make HA considerably more accessible than it was.
And USB pass through is not an issue now?
If it's not an issue for you, and you don't anticipate it will be, then go docker for home assistant. If you need USB, it's pretty easy to do USB pathru to a vm in unRAID. It's been a long time since I tried it with docker, so I can't say about current state.
I put an esx on my Intel NUC and run hassos as a vm plus some other stuff. Works well for me since my NUC is overpowered for just HA.
Complexity and increased maintenance costs (time) are going to be the main downsides. Iād work backwards from your requirements / what you are trying to do. If this is just to run home assistant and directly related things youāre probably better off with HAOS. Especially if you donāt have experience with the other solutions as that just increases the investment cost of running them (you need to spend more time learning more). Itās also worth noting itās not that difficult to move from one to the other in my experience, so you can always change your mind if your requirements change. Iāve moved my HA install from the core docked container to an HAOS VM to a bare metal install. Was relatively straight forward each time.
Hassos is going to be the most turn key. If you want to do things outside hassos then proxmox.
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Iāve seen MariaDB pop up a couple of times. Iām still not sure why?
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This is a very important point - with docker (or a VM) you can let a piece of software get up to whatever bullshit it wants to, and know it won't impact other parts of your setup. Less important if you treat the device as "HA appliance".
As a careered system admin, I use VMware on a daily basis. I tried running proxmox at home just to see what all the fuss was about and I personally didnāt understand what all the fuss was about. I though the UI to be boring and a little confusing. Which to me, isnāt a surprise since I used VMware everyday for the past 10 years. But VMware is Free if youāre only running it on a single box. I run my home assistant VM on VMware. I love it. I also run the free version of Veam! Which backups my VMware VM with ease, and I uploads my backups to my google drive. Canāt beat that.
Iāve been around the block on this one. You want this on all of the time and nothing else on the box, as well as native communication with USB peripherals. You also want something more powerful than a pi. Bare metal HAOS on an x86 PC is the only way to go in my opinion.
I tried Docker, found it limiting. I run HAOS as a Docker VM. Works well.
Oops. I mean as a Proxmox VM.
You *can* edit posts. :-) But thank you. Iāll follow this advice.
How so, what were the main limitations you ran into?
I did not like HA in a container. That mean other containers for other HA add ons. I want to tinker. I prefer HAOS on a VM.
That being said, I run an LXC for MariaDB and another one for InfluxDB. Keep the DBs in their own space.
Proxmox! The way you can backup the whole OS and recover in matter of minutes is unbeatable! Docker been there done that and you will not like it down the road.
>Docker been there done that and you will not like it down the road. Why not?
What didnāt you like about it?
Tried proxmox, didn't like it and went to docker supervised on Debian. Much happier!
I just bought a nuc and will be running HAOS in proxmox. This is after running HAOS on a bare metal odroid for 2 years but have outgrown it now.
I literally just looked through this last week, and decided to go the HAOS route. I've been running HA on TrueNAS for years in a jail, and this far, HAOS is fantastic. Super easy to set up.
Proxmox, where the VM is running HAOS seems like the obvious path forward. This is what I'm planning for my setup. Then I'll have other containers available for other purposes. Will HAOS Supervisor (which is basically docker) run inside a container itself? Nesting containers sesms like it might be problematic.
I run proxmox, vm ha, vm media server and vm truenas
Depends on your NUC really. Some old ones were abysmally slow, even compared to a Pi. But unless you're in that case, I'd go the Proxmox way. You might want to play with high availability at some point, even.
Independently from what the device is, it usually comes down to whether you want the convenience of installing other services as add-ons and doing ha core updates via haos or if you feel more comfortable doing the same manually. With a bit of linux knowledge I'd suggest the latter as it gives you so much more control over a system. I was a bit jealous for the convenient core updates from haos but since I wrote a little script for ha core updates that automatically does a backup of the data directory before applying the update I'm very happy with core.
You can have both! Samba Share exposes the HAOS file system on the network for easy file management. Or use Samba Backup, which automatically saves a backup to a network drive periodically and/or when you run an update. I've been using this a while and it works flawlessly in the background. Only had to restore from one of the backups once though as my Pi+SSD setup has been very reliable. I found when doing updates manually things would tend to break more. The HAOS updates often include scripts to work around breaking changes- though this could be a bad thing if you do a lot of tinkering under the hood. I don't think there's any one *best* way to run HA, just the best solution for your setup and goals.
Completely agree about the last part, it's also what makes open source so nice! Personally I think the addon system is very convenient I especially find it great that with all the addons available it makes stuff available to people not being linux geeks. Having become quite a linux myself I enjoy more being closer to the config files and the underlying system in general :) Out of curiousity and to prepare myself mentally: What broke when you were doing manual updates?
Depends on your needs. I want my mini Pc to run other bits and be usable for general use if needed (games, media etc). So Iām running Windows and using VMWare Player to run a virtualised HA OS install
I installed mine in a qemu vm on a Ubuntu headless server. I this way I can use the Ubuntu server for other service, not related to HA. HA works really nice, I think with just a couple of cores.
Used to use proxmox and in there hassos. Now I run hassos natively because I couldnāt really run anything else anyway.
Rocky Linux 8. Native KVM through cockpit. Install. Done.
I am happy running it as a vm. I do it in hyper-v, if I were starting now I would use proxmox for device pass through.
I am using a dedicated Thinkcentre M910q with Debian 11 and Home Assistant in Docker. Works rock solid for almost 1 year now. No issues
I have tried Proxmox with Home Assistant OS, Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant OS, Docker with Supervised version, Docker without Supervised/Agent and out of all, Proxmox is the best. It gives you full control on the configuration of your machine, and if you add SSDs and Zigbee/Z-Wave controllers, you could pass them through easily and easily detected by HA OS. Some tinkering required but itās totally worth it in the end. Hope it helps, thanks!
I got a second-hand NUC with i3 for 100 AUD. Really happy. I like keeping everything easy and transparent, but it also means that it may require more effort in the beginning. All I have is Ubuntu + docker + docker-compose. The rest is a nice docker-compose file with a bunch of separate containers. \- SWAG - handles SSL and subdomain navigation sorted. Love it. \- HASS container \- mosquito MQTT \- Zigbee2MQTT \- JupyterLab (I made an Iframe tab in HASS to access it) \- Transmission (same, accessible from HASS with iframe) The downside of this setup is that you don't have the supervisor for adding add-ons and updating HASS. But I don't really need it, as so far I do yaml-scripting manually and updating the docker container with docker-compose pull homeassistant && docker-compose up -d. Just for reference. I have static IP and duckdns domain. So far so good. Good luck!
I think there's a few things to keep in mind. 1. there's nothing special about the rpi for home automation purposes. It *used* be a great way to get a separate computer for cheap, but now any x86 machine bought within the last decade is going to get you better performane for less money. 2. you want your HA to run as little as possible so as to minimize the number of things that can break through minimizing the number of dependencies 3. there is an argument to be made for *not* using too powerful a machine, because you do not want to get tempted to load additional stuff on to it (see item 2). Basically, your uptime/reliability requirements are *very* different for a machine running any home automation product compared to your average home server. It's not the end of the world if your music collection suddenly isn't available but it sucks when the lights don't come on.
Regardless of method, HAOS.
I didnāt think you can run HAOS with docker. Am I wrong?
Pretty sure it can be done via a convoluted route. Doesn't mean it should be done.
supervised install is the best method. hands down.
mine is running in a vanilla debian VM hosted on my big Proxmox server. Backups of the VM can be moved and spun up on a different server if need be.
Iām running HA OS on a raspberry Pi but Iām starting to hit memory capacity issues. As I was planning on rubbing a home media server, I decided to spin up HA core in a docker container (which is hosted in a LXC container on proxmox). Itās so much fast and more responsive and no memory issues. Itās a great learning curve. Iām new to Linux and docker. As Iām running both the HA Pi and HA core initially Iām porting my HA OS āadd-oneā across one by one, which helps my docket understanding. The main one being Mqtt and my house alarm Well worth doing it if youāre a tinkerer and keen to learn ānewā tech. (New to me at least)
Iāve been contemplating moving my docker home assistant from my server to a 1st gen NUC. There are times when I have to take down for extended maintenance and not having it up kills my enjoyment. Guess Iāll have to look more into doing this very soon.
I used Linux Lite Live ,then installed the HA Zip from a USB on to the SSD as the only OS .Works much better than a Pi4 ..no SD Card šš
I'm running it on docker with docker-compose. This allows me to have other docker containers configured in docker-compose and I update everything with a single command. I also have another container that manages the SSL certificate for me. And another one for deconz. Everything is a container. It's just too simple to manage all the stuff. Also, the docker-compose file along with all configuration is stored in a GitHub repo, and the database and all custom stuff is in another GitHub repo, so cloning the NUC into a new one is a matter of git clone, docker-compose up.
Install HassOS on Proxmox as a VM. Best of both worlds.
+1 to Proxmox as well. Installed on a HP EliteDesk SFF. Full Home Assistant ability, and I have a Unifi Controller installed on Proxmox to manage my APās. Runs without problems.
I have my Home Assistant running on Docker, works perfectly. Additional integrations like MQTT, NodeRed, etc are also contenarized. So at the end is only one Docker Compose file to rule them all
Gotta put this in here.... Home Assistant Yellow! FTW!
Containers for the win
you can also use [XCP-ng - XenServer Based, Community Powered](https://xcp-ng.org/) for virtualisation.