I’m thinking about getting started using Docker and an older Raspberry Pi. I’m already hosting a grafana service on it, so It can’t be fully dedicated to ha. So curious what everyone is using.
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Refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Tiny, in a bhyve vm on FreeBSD
I got a second hand HP Elitedesk mini from ebay. they are small and quite affordable.
I run way to many stuff on it.
Old desktops that the it guy at a previous job showed me how to request
Home Assistant is in a VM in proxmox on a dell micro i5 8th gen. Zeave adapter passed through.
@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>”.
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.HomeAssistant Yellow
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.
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.
People throw a lot of shade at the Pi but I love having dedicated hardware for some more critical projects.
I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
Pi4 w/ SSD.
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 use it to keep track of my fitness progress over time mostly. I just got it set up a couple of months ago, so the verdict is still out as to how much I’ll use it over time.
I just cloned the repo and configured it.
It’s rather good and eye opening. It has exposed some needed changes to my sedentary habits.
This is the dashboard and project: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/23245-garmin-stats/
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 pair of Lenovo M710q mini PCs I got off ebay for £40 each.
I did load them up with RAM, upgrade the CPUs and add a second NIC so they probably came in at more like the cost of a 16Gb Pi5. Each. The RAM was the pricey part. I’ve measured the power usage and they each use about a 3rd more power than the Pi did which I’m happy with. Given that, the added flexibility of running ProxMox and how quiet they are I’m super happy with the setup.
Oh and I used to run PiHole on another Pi. That’s gone now replaced with Technitium DNS running as a pair of VMs too. That was surprisingly easy to do.
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.
Ah, ok.
Yep, I’m in a similar situation… I have a few VMs, but not enough for lots of failover infrastructure… (redundant switches, etc)
I was thinking you might be just cloning 1 device to the other or something.
Oh I have a pair of D-Link switches (again off ebay) that are stacked together. My router, NAS and both ProxMox hosts have LACP connections to both. And my home WiFi is a couple Aruba IAPs, one on each switch. So if I lose a switch then most things will keep running.
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.
Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.
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.
A supermicro 5018A-FNT4 with 16GB RAM. HA takes up about 25%, the rest is influxdb and Grafana.
