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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I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
Home Assistant OS on Raspberry Pi 5. Simple and maintenance free.
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.
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”.
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.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.
Wow! Tell me you have a mikrotik router so i know you are the twin i’ve never had (not an identical twin though)
Mikrotik Hex S
Good choice! (I got my hands on a ccr1009)
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I wanted something I didn’t have to worry about. Beelink mini PC with an N150 and 16GB RAM.
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.
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.
Can confirm: Using a rpi4 with 2GB for a long time worked well.
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
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.
Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.
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.
@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>”.
I got a second hand HP Elitedesk mini from ebay. they are small and quite affordable.
I run way to many stuff on it.
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.
