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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Home Assistant is in a VM in proxmox on a dell micro i5 8th gen. Zeave adapter passed through.
I cobbled together a bunch of second hand stuff from eBay. An i5-12500T is at the heart of it for hardware accelerated encoding, 32 GB ram, an HBA controller for the 4 SAS drives (2x 11 TB and 2x 8 TB). Stuffed all that into an old atx case with an old PSU. Added a tiny touchscreen display for troubleshooting.
I’m pretty happy with this setup. I’m using Unraid and I’m running an arr stack, downloads are done via usenet. Also running jellyfin, Navidrome, Komga, Immich and Adguard.
Im still looking for a good Filesharing service that’s easy to configure and allows user registration.
I’m fairly new to all this. So it’s an exciting journey!
I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!
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.
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)
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.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.
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”.
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
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.
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
@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>”.
Refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Tiny, in a bhyve vm on FreeBSD
HomeAssistant Yellow
Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.
Home Assistant OS on Raspberry Pi 5. Simple and maintenance free.
NUC i7, 32gb ram. Full Docker stack includes home assistant and all relevant containers for it zigbee2mqtt, esphome, vscodium, sqliteweb, rtl_433, mqtt, kokoro_tts, weaviate, zwavejs, openwebui, ollama, paperless with ai capabilities, a1111, whisper, sync thing, searxng, redis, qdrant, postgres. Runs fine, however ollama starts to max it out as I want to go for bigger models, so looking for something with serious gpu oomphbut still small footprint and low power consumption
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.