I wanted something I didn't have to worry about. Beelink mini PC with an N150 and 16GB RAM.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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I use a dedicated Raspberry Pi (5, previously had on a 4).
I host everything else on a different server, the HA one is dedicated. Pretty nice because then it can run HAOS and basically manages everything itself.
One factor in keeping it separate was I wanted it to be resilient. I don't want stuff to stop working if I restart my server or if the server dies for some reason. My messing around on my server is isolated from my smart home.
I also have a separate Pi (4, previously on a Pi 1B) that runs Pi-hole, on it's own Pi for the same reason - if it stops working or even pauses for a moment, the internet stops working.
People throw a lot of shade at the Pi but I love having dedicated hardware for some more critical projects.
Yeah I run HAOS in a VM but I keep a backup on an SD card that I can pop into a raspi if for whatever reason the server is down.
I have a proxmox host on a HP Elitedesk G3 with an i5 7500. In that I have a VM with HAOS and it runs like a dream. If something goes horribly wrong I can get remote terminal access from the proxmox interface along with rebooting and backing things up.
Also, you can actually run Grafana under HomeAssistant directly, though that does mean if HA is down then you also lose Grafana at the same time. IMO it is reasonable to use lots of stuff alongside HA but monitoring and remote access should be on a separate machine, and for that I have an old laptop (integrated battery so no need for UPS) and that machine is really only for managing remote access and monitoring.
That makes sense. And definitely need to keep my grafana service as is since it's basically a fitness service that I pair with Garmin. I was thinking about spinning up another instance to keep them separate since I might move the fitness service to a cloud provider eventually. Thanks for sharing!!!
Oh wow, I just had a look at that, normally Grafana is used for monitoring things like server response times and internal stats. Using for a Garmin fitness device is awesome! I would never have thought of it as a good way to get that kind of data and see it visually.
Do you use it to see your training progress over time? Or is it more for seeing specific runs and comparing? How do you actually use it? Is it useful for you?
I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
Home Assistant is in a VM in proxmox on a dell micro i5 8th gen. Zeave adapter passed through.
raspi 4 in a container.
basically running since the 4 was released
That's what I was thinking about doing too.
Up until a couple of weeks I was running it on a dedicated Pi4. It's now running as a VM in ProxMox on a Lenovo M710q I got off ebay for £40.
I did load it up with RAM, upgrade the CPU and add another NIC so it probably came in at more like the cost of a 16Gb Pi5. I measured the powered usage and it uses about a 3rd more power than the Pi did. Given that, the added flexibility of running ProxMox and how quiet it is I'm super happy with it.
It's now running as a VM in ProxMox on a pair of Lenovo M710q mini PCs
So, have you got High Availability setup? If so, I'd like to know more about that part...
So my plan had been to set up a pair of ProxMox hosts, use Ceph to do the shared storage and use HA so VMs could magically move around if a host died. However, I discovered Ceph and HA need a minimum of 3 hosts. HA can be done if you set up a Pi or some other 3rd host that can act as the 3rd vote in the event of a failure but as I didn't have Ceph I've not bothered trying.
I've read Ceph can work on 2 but not well or reliably.
I might setup a 3rd host some day but it seems a bit of a waste as I just don't need that amount of resources for what I'm running.
And I should have known really, I've a bit of a background in VMware, albeit at the enterprise level so I've never had to even think about 2 or 3 node clusters.
I hit this stumbling block.
And I don't quite want to go the whole hog/headache of HA.
My solution was to run warm-spare: Once a week the VM can be synced to the second box, but never powered on.
And HA backups are pretty good anyway, it doesn't take long to bring it back.
You can do HA in Proxmox with ZFS replication instead of Ceph. Third device something else as you said. It's what I'm doing.
Thanks, I'll look into it.
You don't happen to know of a guide on how to set this up? All I've found so far has told me that ZFS isn't meant to mirror over network.
Or do you mean how you can enable replication on a VM?
You can enable replication, and once you have the VM disk replicated, you can enable High Availability. Open the VM in the webinterface, click "More" at bottom right, and select "Manage HA".
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Wow! Tell me you have a mikrotik router so i know you are the twin i've never had
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In Docker on a Synology DS1522+, works well. I used to use the Synology HA app, but it was always some versions behind, and I was pleasantly surprised that backup and restore was easy to move it to Docker. I'd say that if you change your mind about how you host it in future that it will be fairly easy to change.
Can you tell me more about this setup? I'm considering a Synology option.
Sure. Synology DSM is a Linux distro for Synology hardware. DSM includes Docker CE, so you can just use that from the terminal if you want but they also include a "Container Manager" GUI app. I mostly use the app but need to sometimes dip into the terminal when the app gets stuck on updating container images.
There's not much to mention about Home Assistant specifically, just that you have two options: Docker or the SynoCommunity app. Docker is easier to migrate somewhere else, but with Home Assistant's backup/restore you're not locked in to either option.
Anyway, for the pros: it works fine and has the advantage that it has fast access to my data since it's on the same hardware. It's also a small power footprint at 50W for 5x3.5" disks, 40GB RAM and 4 CPUs, especially compared to my previous setup of 3 Proxmox nodes using the DiskStation as SAN storage over iSCSI. It's not as powerful for compute obviously, but much more efficient.
The main con is that it's Synology, so you are to some extent captive to whatever they are up to. I've looked into alternative distros for DiskStations and there aren't really any options that seemed better to me at the time. YMMV.
That's kind of what I was thinking of building out actually, so I'll look into that as an option, thanks!
@ohlaph Home Assistant OS on a Dell Micro with an i5-6500T in it and 16 GB of RAM.
Runs extremely well, just slow for ESPHome builds so I don't use the add-on anymore. Also while TTS is plenty fast I couldn't use any larger than tiny-int8 or base-int8 for faster-whisper. I offloaded that to my server with my old RTX 2070 in it and have it able to run the turbo model for speech to text.
But no Ollama or similar, fuck using those. I've only ever gotten uselessness out of them and I ain't paying someone else to use theirs to do the same thing just with slightly fewer incidents of "I didn't find a device called <the thing you said but slightly out of order and now the exact same as it's actually called>".
Old desktops that the it guy at a previous job showed me how to request
An "old" PC with an i7-4790T and 32 GB RAM.
I have also some Odroid devices based on 32bit-ARM.
But 32bit-ARM has the problem, that meanwhile many container images doesn't support this architecture anymore.
So, when your Pi is already 64bit-ARM it could be ok.
Otherwise the possible selection regarding available prepared container images may be smaller.
Refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Tiny, in a bhyve vm on FreeBSD
Dedicated Proxmox VM. Raspis are notoriously getting on my nerves so I basically purged most of them ouf of my environment. I now have a proper rack and multiple nodes,but used to run it on a used mini PC as a proxmox VM as well.
Zimablade/board are also a great choice,btw.
Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.
I upgraded from a Pi2 to a second hand thinkpad. It went from underpowered to also running a NAS and a factorio server with plenty of precessing power to spare. I've used it for several other projects as needed. Docker compose makes everything trivial.
Pi5 runs my reverse proxy and then all services run as docker containers on my battery stripped laptop I used in 2020.
The laptop mounts a raid5 HDD array that the pi5 maintains
Please note that Home Assistant is officially supported on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with 2GB of RAM minimum Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant
If your older rpi is for instance a rpi 3 with 512MB of RAM, I'm not sure it's going to cut it.
Huh, I'm running it on a rpi 3B which was (barely) supported when I installed Home Assistant on it. It has only 1GB of memory but it's still working very well! I don't have a ton of automations though
Can confirm: Using a rpi4 with 2GB for a long time worked well.
Dedicated N100 mini pc. It has more than enough everything…. Except for whisper and other AI stuff. That’s a silly situation where whisper takes longer than the dedicated gpu (and mind you we’re talking RX 6400, not 5090) outputs the results.
VM under TrueNAS
A Dell 3140 laptop. With HA and a number of other apps it loafs along at about 5% CPU. When Frigate is enabled it jumps up to 14% or so while drawing between 6 and 12 watts. The battery prevents power blinks in our area from being a problem, unlike my Pi4 that crashed and didn't recover when I was hundreds of miles away. The battery lasts hours when the power fails and the keyboard and display are convenient.
For those concerned about the battery, it's firmware limited to a 70% charge so it will last years. Current Li-Ion batteries have about a 1 in a million chance of fire. A car parked in your garage is hundreds of times more of a risk.
It's been excellent and I'd buy it again.
I have a HP microserver running Debian and Docker. But it runs far more than just HA. It runs all my self hosted stuff except for my pihole.
It’s hosted on Docker on Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s actually doing a trillion other things too and it’s not bogged down at all.
I moved home assistant from a raspberry pi 4 to a NUC a few years back with a few other services (ZigBee, mqtt, etc) and it's been fantastic. I'm also running frigate on the same system with a Google Coral for object detection and it handles the load of several network camera feeds well.
3rd or 4th gen Intel NUC with an i5 and 16GB RAM. Running proxmox with 1 VM (Home Assistant) and about 10 LXC.
A Xeon E5-2650v4 on a Supermicro X10DRL-i and like a million dollars worth (128GB) of DDR4.
Home Assistant OS on Raspberry Pi 5. Simple and maintenance free.
HomeAssistant Yellow
Pi4 w/ SSD.
Put my old PC in a 4U server case and have it in a rack (minus the GPU)... I also added a ton of RAM early last year (thank god). I'm probably wasting electricity but it's fine.. I can spin up anything and everything without issues which is nice compared to my old NUC and laptop servers that would crash frequently.
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