443 I found an Excellent Raspberry Pi Replacement for Home Assistant / IOTstack (incl. Proxmox) 

Been using this for long and have no regrets. Proxmox and docker creates so many more possibilities. media centers, dns, adguard, pihole and many more

As always, great video. I moved to tiny micro PCs for my home server back in 2019. I remember with an i7 processor, it was like being on a jet engine, super fast compared to a raspberry pi. Also, backup and recovery staff are superfast. I will never regret my great move. 😊

I really like your videos. Thanks for the awesome work. Just one word of caution: Whenever it comes to power saving, the TDP is often used to decide which hardware to use. I learned it myself the hard way. My two server systems A2SDi-16C-HLN4F (32W TDP CPU) and A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F (25W TDP CPU) come not even close to 30 Watt power usage. Platform power saving feature support is way more important than the TDP numbers… Apart from choosing your hardware wisely, there are also BIOS and software settings to take care of. That is the main reason I am writing this comment. I think that there may be some potential to save even more power… To achieve the power consumption I mentioned further down I did the following: Used a pico PSU. Be careful: in my system it only supported 2 nvme ssds. But in this way I saved between 10-15 watts compared to my Gold rated SFX and ATX PSUs I made a video going trough all BIOS settings pages to “remember” the state without any changes. And later a second video recording all the changes I made:) I updated the BIOS to the most recent version. I loaded the BIOS default to have a reference point. In BIOS switched c-states on and selected the highest c-state number available In BIOS switched p-states / package p-states and selected the highest number In BIOS I enabled ASPM for all available pcie and chipset devices In BIOS I turned ACPI on Removed all pcie cards and other not crucial devices - just to make finding problems more easy… In proxmox I installed the following packages powertop, i7z, cpufrequtils, acpi-support, acpid, api Ran powertop and tab trough the pages. Kept an eye on the p- and c-states as well as the “bad” entries. Then ran powertop - -autotune. That did drop the power usage quite a bit. Ran cpufreq-info. Here you can see what frequencies the cores are running and what cpu governor is used (was “performance” in my case) Changed the governor to “powersave” or “ondemand”. In one of my systems “powersave” would not allow the cpu to go over the minimum frequency. There you can also see whether your system is using intel-p-state driver or ACPI driver It may be worth it to edit the /etc/default/grub to make the system use ACPI OR p-states I put the hdd to sleep with hdparm. Yes I am aware that this may not be suitable for every setup One by one added the components back in the system and looked at the changes that made to power consumption My system automatically switched from p-state driver to ACPI after installing the ACPI support. This resulted in less power usage. After doing the above settings, my system is using less than half of the power in comparison to running “stock” BIOS settings and “stock” proxmox. For about one week I am now using my new “server”: ASROCK H670m-itx, 64 GB RAM, i5-12400, 2 nvme ssds, one 12 TB Ironwolf pro all powered by a pico PSU. With the hdd running the system uses around 22 W. I put the hdd the sleep most of the time, because I just use it once an week for backing up my data to an additional drive. In this state the system uses between 15 and 17 W. The board as an Intel 1 GbE Nic and a Realtek 2,5 GbE one. Power measurements were done with either one connected. If I put an Intel dual i710 10 GbE NIC in my server idle power goes up around 10 W. Unfortunately my mainboard does not handle pcie power saving well. ASPM is not fully support. That issue I will have to investigate. Maybe I will contact ASROCK. I suspect it is a BIOS or BIOS setting issue. As for the Realtek NIC… I turned it of, because it was giving me a really hard time in proxmox using docker containers. The containers would randomly drop the connection making them inaccessible. It took me quite some time before I realised the Realtek NIC was to blame and not the reverse proxy configuration I was trying to set up… I then tried out a GigaByte B660i mainboard which as an Intel 225V NIC. That NIC on that specific board was using over 8 watts when there was close to no network traffic (just the proxmox web interface and no vm running). This board was handling pcie power saving better, but had general stability issues and only has one nvme slot. So I stayed with my ASROCK board. Whether 10GbE, an Intel 2,5 GbE card or just 1 GbE will be used I still have to decide. I also tried an Aquantia based 10 GbE card. It seemed to work ok in proxmox that is (vsphere is a different story) but the Intel card uses about the same power and gives more features (SR-IOV and hardware offloading). This server replaced my Supermicro servers. My systems were running proxmox and later vmware vsphere. As prices for electricity are going really up, I got rid of my cluster (3 nodes). Spending over 85 W combined when the machines were idle was getting too expensive for just playing around. So from now on I will be using just one server. My problem with the server hardware was, that it was not possible to push the servers under 30 watts in idle. I went trough all the settings in the BIOS, turned off network cards and even cores hovering at the 30 W mark. The remote management alone is using between 5 and 8 watts of power. When I build the systems 5 years ago, everyone told me I should use server hardware. Remote management, ECC RAM and better stability sounded good at that time. Stability was not an issue in the 5 years. As for ECC RAM not a single error was reported on the machines… But I noticed that many of the power saving options my consumer hardware was giving me weren’t available on my servers. My HPE Microserver Gen10plus would not work with ACPI… even if I did all the step above and edited the grub file to disable intel p-states… That BIOS is quite special and some power saving settings are not available. The HPE ILO5 is using also around 8 W. After all the optimisations the Microserver was using approximately 20 W. Another minus for me: HPE disabled the integrated GPU of the processor. This is done in hardware. There is no way to enable the igpu. I wanted to have some gpu acceleration available. If that wasn’t the case I would not have bought new hardware. Again something I learned after buying the server. You have to use ILO remote, a VGA monitor or adaptor to setup that machine. The display port is connected to the ILO gpu (matrox) and only works in Windows or Linux after installing the drivers… So I decided to use consumer hardware for the next HOME server. No remote management or ECC support on my platform. As for remote management I can use pikvm to add that feature. The pi will do that job excellently and uses only 2-3 W while doing so. And for ECC I just cross my fingers that it will be a no issue as it was in the past. And if hardware disaster strikes I still do have way to much hardware in my “homelab” to quickly setup a backup machine. But what I think it is more likely, that I make some stupid configurations while playing around and will have to use one of my backups with “known good states” of my software setup :). Im looking forward for the next video. 😃

I was so tired of waiting for a pie just to try home-assistent. Last week finally decided to get a cheap NUC. My Home assistant is small as I m still finding out stuff. The NUC runs very silent, very cool and only uses less than 5W.

It's a shame that Raspberry Pi have completely abandoned the maker community that they built their company off. 400k pi's still being built per month but all going to "commercial partners". You'd think Pi Trading was going to float on the stock market.....

Tip: I often buy laptops with broken screens for dirt cheap (i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD for 30 CHF). Not only it runs no problem for server tasks, same as the machine on the video, but on top it has built-in ups :)

I've been using refurbished "mini PCs" for years instead of RPis because of the more reliable storage setup (and CPU options in cases where performance is a factor). I usually spend the few extra bucks for a new replacement SSD. For these refurbished units it's really important to test them fully. I've had iffy memory and out of 10+ systems, one had an intermittent motherboard issue. I'd add to the list at 9:24 that updating the BIOS is a must.

Kind of an amazing find. I have only bought one PI so I will be looking into these mini servers.

I've bought dozens of these boxes over the years for everything from home assistant servers, remote desktop PCs for maintenance of onsite systems, node red servers, etc etc. They really are great and can be bought for less than a pi depending on spec. Another advantage over other options is that these fit nicely into a rack. I usually use a 1U rack shelf and sit these on. they look neat with the rest of the rack.

As far as i understand in Proxmox when it comes to CPUs there is no issue if you overcommit CPUs on the VMs. If both of the VMs ask for all cores at some point, the scheduler will just spread the host and VM processes equally to the actual cores. And if only one VM needs the processing power while the others are idle then that one will be able to get all the processing power it needs. But it is not the same with RAM though. You need to make sure you do not overcommit RAM on the VMs and split it specifically mostly to always make sure that the host has enough to operate. Otherwise if both VM request the maximum RAM allocated at some point it will not leave any left for the host and the device will momentarily freeze and you will have frequent cuts on the services running.

I used a Zotac CI323 Nano with two ethernet ports and proxmox to build a all-in-one home router. The virtual machines are OPNsense as Firewall, pihole for adblocking and iobroker for my home automation. it runs fine with 8GB RAM for a small home network and using LXC containers for pihole and iobroker helps saving memory resources. Also backing up the vms is super easy.

If you have an old laptop sitting around, just use that. You get plenty of power to run a ton of docker containers. I have 16 containers running (including home assistant) on a 10 year old laptop. You even get a screen and keyboard for debugging when things go wrong and ssh isn't working. And free battery backup.

I decided to get a Thinkcentre M900 with an i5-6500T, 8GB RAM. Had old SSD and HDD to put into it, and now I have a pretty powerful (for my use case) server. Got it for around $75 off of eBay. I'd say it's money well spent. I have tens of Docker containers running on it, on top of AlmaLinux 9, accessible through cloudflare tunnel. Everything runs smoothly, and being x86_64, I don't have to worry about software support and such.

I have replaced my RPi 2 "home server" with Dell Wyse 5070 with 4GB RAM and 16GB eMMC purchased for something like 80EUR. It takes less than 10W, has no fan and I have it in closed cabinet. Temperature inside is 34'C. Yesterday I put WD SA500 SSD in it and installed Proxmox. This is awesome, much more value than new RPi.

Thanks for the great breakdown and cost analysis. The raspberry pi shortages definitely require us all to become creative with our home project! A new alternative that I've also been looking at is the Celeron N5105 mini PCs. I've been seeing them pop up for around $180 USD which can also be competitive when comparing to an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 with case and power.

I got a new laptop, it has a i5-1245U CPU, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and a 58Wh battery. A new toy and a new discovery: The power supply was ice cold! This sparked some curiosity about the power consumtion and made some measurements (All taken on the input side of the power supply with a cheap power-meter). No measurable power consumption when it is charged and switched off. After switching it on, the uEFI firmware prompted me for the SSD password: 15 Watt After entering the password, I paused it in the grub bootloader: 20 Watt I continued to boot, a linux kernel and an initramfs was loaded and the kernel started. Then the scripts in the initramfs prompted for the LUKS/cryptsetup password: 5.9 Watt I entered the password and let it boot into the Gnome Desktop and let it idle there: 6.1 Watt to 8 Watt (6.5 Watt on average) I switched off the Display and Keyboard illumination, i.e. doing nothing important with lights off: 2.5 Watt

Another keeper ! Another video packed with information. Many youtubers would make 2-3 separate video with this content, to optimize their revenue. Not Andreas. Also, as usual Andeas goes one step further as most RU-vidrs. As a real engineer, analyzing all aspects, including computing long term power costs Love it ! /chrisV

Thanks, as always, Andreas. I had been wondering at the use of these thin clients as a headless server for many reasons a while ago and seeing how locked down they seemed to be had dismissed them. Think I will have to revisit this. I have one main server that started out as a NAS/VM server and is slowly becoming used more for storing and presenting IoT data from the ever increasing number of devices around my house. So wanted to use a thin client as a server backup just for IoT as a backup server to avoid the single point of failure and to allow me to do maintenance and reboot the main server regularly, which is not easy at the mo. Concern about power consumption (esp at the moment) was another concern, as well as that we run our own DNS here, which I am currently using an old Pi as a secondary nameserver for. So lots to think about from your video. Thanks for the work you have put in on this, even if it now gives me yet another thing to think about!! Best wishes, Sarah

I have been trying to solve the PI issue for the last couple of weeks and still searching for a replacement.. We need I/O ports as well a relatively fast processor since we will use screen mirroring for some projects.. Andreas this is very interesting - we also need a video comparing things like RASPBERRY pi, ondroid, banana pi, orange pi and other to find a real replacement for our projects! Thank you Andreas for the great video!

Thanks for great video and chapters about power consumption. I recently purchased Odroid H3 as an alternative to my RPi4 (home-server). It is like full PC. It has x86 Intel and it can run under 2W in idle! I measured 1.2-1.8 W power consumption (only device, without power supply). It runs on 12V and I have connected 1x 16GB DDR4 RAM and 1x 256GB m.2 SSD (Adata XPG SX6000 Pro). OS: Debian 11 with kernel 5.19.0 and applied tweaks via powertop utility.

Very timely for me, just last week I bought a Wyse 5060 to do just this and reclaim the Pi currently running HA for something where the smaller size and GPIO are an advantage.

I bought a HP t520 thin client for about 10$. Even this old hardware with a dual core cpu, M2 ssd and 4 gb DDR3 ram, performs better then a Raspberry pi. Also stability is more better. Power consumption aso can't be concerned, it consumes only 10 watts.

The issue with those tiny PCs is still power consumption. 15w for running continuously is going to cost a lot in electricity. I am running an Orange Pi Zero LTS at home as a "micro server", and it consumes about 0.8w, which is hard to beat. Perfectly capable to run Pi-hole DNS, a web server, a DLNA server, a file server etc. All my storage is online, so I don't need a lot of local storage.

I actually built that same computer last year for a media center in the living room. Those M93 tinys are awesome !

I bought an old Thinkpad T430 for this which gives me a battery backup as well. And it has bt, wifi, slots for 2 sata drives. It runs my mail server, websites, hass, pleroma (mastodon alternative) and a lot more... on top of that I used it as emergency workstation when my main pc broke down. I could run Windows VM on it with igpu passthrough. And the total cost was 60 for the laptop, 20 for ram upgrade to 16G and storage SSDs which I already had.

I've been saying this for over a year now... way better than a Pi... particularly when people started added SSDs, you basically have the same machine, but much slower. Where I live you can get a SSF used pc for dirt cheap.

Second hand laptop ftw. It's nearly free come with everything you need ( from windows to m&k) and have built in battery ( ZigBee tend to mess up after powercuts ). I think I wrote it in the last video among more tips but it didn't go through for some reason.

I use a zbox PI335 (N4100 6W TDP). The size is similar to a Pi4, but it comes in a case with passive cooling and 64GB included. With default settings it draws ~2W in idle and 6W on full load while being ~30% faster then a PI4 drawing 9W. Increasing the TDP in Bios to 12W makes it draw ~12W under full load (passive cooling is still sufficient) while being approximately twice as fast as a Pi4. It's suitable for running server(s) on it. But sadly it's missing the pins. No 5W power output, no gpios, no i2c, no spi...

Ha Excellent Thanks for sharing your hardware home automation experiences . By the way, there are some excellent deals to be found on systems with AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon processors. Somewhat more costly in power usage but good fun to play around with.

I usually use older Laptop mainboards for this purpose now. They come with CPU and lots of connectors on the motherboard so you just have to add m2 ssd storage and ram to the setup. The CPU power ist decent, and space is even smaller than a thinclient.

So much fun reading everyone's setup for home assistant OTHER than raspberry. I always thought raspberry was the holy grail for HA just because of community support and it's popularity. From the comments here I got a very different story. Just a week after I finally decided not to wait for the raspberries to become available again and go with a cheap NUC. All your comments work great to prevent buyers remorse.😁😁

I run my home automation (Node-RED, Grafana, Influx, pi-hole) on RPi 1 with 512MB of RAM. At some point I wanted to switch to RPi4 8GB, but it was already out of the market. TinyPC (well, any PC) is not a RPi replacement. There is no GPIO so most of my home automation won't work (lots of 1wire thermometers, MCP23017, etc). I would have to buy expensive external GPIO over USB plus much higher power consumption would lead to noticable bigger cost. No idea why so many people suggest tinyPC *as a RPi replacement* forgetting about GPIO which is the biggest RPi advantage.

I have been playing with these "1L" low-TDP boxes for about a month now and I too was surprised by how fast they are! Managed to get two Lenovo M900 (i5-6500T) for $75 CDN but usually these are ~$250+CDN but the cheapest Pi4/8GB(kit) I was able to get in Canada a few months ago was $300 CDN so "1L" PCs are a better deal IMHO. Oh, and yes, Proxmox is fantastic!

What is the noise level using such a solution? I assume the machines have fans? I live in a small apartment, so for me it's important, that my home server is perfectly quiet.

A single Raspberry Pi booting from SSD to USB is plenty fast for Home Assistant (it's what I use), but the ultimate win here is power savings and cost. I get that the Pi is unobtanium at this point, but a PC with VMs is usually going to burn more power, so the cost to run 24x7 is higher. But in this climate, you have to do what you have to do. Maybe one day we will be able to get some glorious SBCs again.

I just picked up a Beelink U59 Pro Celeron N5105 16 GB (NUC) 11th gen CPU with 500 GB SSD M.2, 2 network ports, 4xUSB3, 1xUSB C, 2xHDMI. I paid about £220 on Amazon. I could have bought it cheaper but I wanted Amazon support in case of problems. Full x64 with Windows 11 pre-activated. I installed Ubuntu 22.10 on a regular SSD in the empty slot. I can do VAAPI & QSV hardware encoding - Pi only has v4l2m2m which is far inferior. For low power video encoding it is ideal. I am spending this week investigating hardware encoding using ffmpeg. Add in all the accessories needed with the Pi 4 and the Celeron is still a bit more expensive but is MUCH more capable and will last the test of time better. I am walking away from Pi 4s now, they just can’t compete with a 11th gen Celeron N5105.

Great video. I have some cases full of these MFF pc's with 8th gen i5 processors and 16GB DDR4. Finally got a use case for using these. Also runs ProxMox fine with no slowdowns. A good tip is to check that the computers have the latest BIOS updates provided. Some of these Micro pc's can run from a smaller, more efficient PSU.

These, amazon renewed, are like 120$. Best small PC options ever.

This is perhaps the most bookmarkable youtube video for me right now. I'm in the process of re-purposing a Dell-Wyse Thin Client ($55 on Ebay) to run Proxmox, HA, etc. Upped RAM to 16GB (had a spare 8GB stick) and a larger SSD. I am stunned at how complete Proxmox is. What a great learning experience for an old guy like me. Whereas most YT videos have crap comments, yours always have insightful and informative ones (unlike this one).

Loved all the topics covered. But, why don't you use a 905 chip processor tvbox based and install any linux distro on it and go from there? I have it at my home. - Super light in power consumption. - Extremely fast. - Cheap (around 40€ or around 15€ second hand.) On top of it, it runs docker containers quite fast tho.

A good alternative for RPi is used Intel Compute sticks (especially the m3/m5 variants). They run fine from a 5V3A PSU and have quite a lot of performance.

:) that video came out quick! - Regarding the open question about proxmox cpu handling. In my setup, proxmox itself is showing 4 cores ( Pentium(R) Silver J5005 CPU ) and if I assign 1 core to a container that runs bad code (in my example, frigate exeeding disc space) and runs into 100%, the proxmox server itself saw a 25% increase in cpu-usage. Hence I never give all 4 cores to a single instance.

I bought a pile of 8 identical thinkcentres last year when PI's started to become scarce and overpriced. I think i paid roughly $70 each with no HD. So far so good and i have them all maxed out on memory. They make for great little servers and desktops. No issues and highly stable. I have a nice little cluster going that is a mix of thinkcenters and RPIs.

I used such a pc, installed ubuntu via usb stick and then used the homeassitant convinience script and its up and running:)

I've been using these beasts for my K8s setup! Raspberry Pis are just not powerful enough. These little ITX M910Q Thinkcentre boxes are excellent.

There are all sorts of set-top boxes on the amlogic905x4 processor (arm a55 x4 + graphics ). In the 4/64 configuration you can find a new one in the range of $35. Judging by the video reviews armbian on them works quite well and it consumes about 10 watts in working mode.

Nice to see some more exposure to the TinyMiniMicro-Machines (ServeTheHome has a long running series about them). I switched my setup from one beefy old enterprise machine over to one dedicated HA box (Acer Veriton N4620G, 2nd gen i3... runs at ~7-9W and looks cool :D) and 3 Lenovo Tiny (2x i5 + 16GB [M73]. one as a sandbox mostly turned off, one for essentials like pihole and other stuff, but inside LXC instead of docker, 3rd one has a Pentium Gold and 8GB but was the bigger variant [m720q] which supports PCIe cards. Dropped my Quadro P400 in there and it runs 7 streams FullHD at only 19W using unlocked drivers and emby/jellyfin). The cool thing with multiple of those running as a proxmox cluster: I can do maintance (installing a smart-plug for example) without downtime, just migrate the container/VM to another host, shutdown the first and reverse afterwards. Current Consumption: - PvE 1: ~12-14W - PvE 2: (sandbox) off, aka 0W else same ~12-14W - PvE 3: (media server): ~16W - HA (Acer i3): 8W One thing to note for people running Lenovo Tiny machines: Turn off "Smart Power On" and everything in there except Wake-On-LAN, else your machine won't stay off when shutting down via proxmox and instead do an instant boot afterwards. With those settings turned off I can finally get my 2nd machine to stay off and wake it up via proxmox if I want to tinker around. Oh and another thing: There's cheap (~20,-) adapters which can take 2x m.2 SSDs inside a regular 2.5" SATA enclosure. With that you can run something like a mirror-setup of fast storage inside a VM beside your normal boot/proxmox SSD already in there and safer then using a normal 2.5" drive.

Amazing what one can get for US$100 or so these days. Those Lenovos would have bested proper servers from ~10 years ago, especially for the power consumption!

I'm running Home Assistant on proxmox with a Seed Odyssey (Celeron J4105) and monitoring using a power monitoring smart plug. My old server was drawing 75W when I cut it back to just Home Assistant, and this one draws roughly 3.5W. There are plenty of new tiny form factor mini PCs available with that CPU or better in the £100-200 range, and you get a real M.2 Slot and/or SATA.

The RPi were useful when the price was $35-$55 USD. At 2-3X that price, they are no longer competitive.

I got my lenovo M92 tiny with a i3-2120T CPU running with debian a while ago but couldn't decide to make the move. Last Year, Inspired by your videos, I tried IOT-Stack but switched to plane docker-compose. I used my Setup with raspberry pis and X86 as well. It's really not that hard, to make it work on both platforms. The Lenovo is very versatile. Also, there are no cluttered cables and everything is nice and tidy. I was curious how the power consumption would be. Initially after installing Debian, It used about 18 watts in idle mode. Now comes the interesting part: i enabled various power saving methods like described in debians "SimplePowerSave" script. Later i made some experiments running powertop as a systemd unit. -----> It uses 8 Watts in idle mode now! I must admit, there are no services running by now, but it made a stunning 10W difference. You should try it out! But be aware: It powers down the usb in idle, to a point where even keyboards and mice power down if you adopt all recommendations from the links. I had to click the mouse or keyboard twice before it could be used again. This could be a problem to your conbee-stick. But i'm sure it's just some advanced configuration neccesary to make it work or you can exclude usb from power saving completely. I didn't fiddle with it any longer, since i will not move my Smart home setup to it by now. Maybe i will setup a full clone system and make a comparison. You should experiment with Debians "SimplePowerSave" Script. I tried to inderstand powertop quickly but variants of the "SimplePowerSave" Scripts will do the job, however you make them persistent. I mean: -----> It uses 8 Watts in idle mode now! --> How great is that??😀

Awsome video glad the thin clients worked out. I've just purchased the fijitsu for a pfsense router to replace a pc, I do have my proxmox on a xeon e3 1220l with ha but would like eventually re do that.

raspberry pis are gimmicks.. they were interesting for a short period of time, but people always wanted to use them as desktop computers, so the specs kept going higher and higher, to the point where they need heatsinks with fans and they're more expensive than a cheap mini itx or micro atx solution. If they could get the prices back down to sane levels and keep them in stock, they might be worth it, but until then, they're gimmicks.

I buy RPi for GPIO and how easy it is to write Python for GPIO...in addition to running a Linux OS I can use for other stuff. Is there an alternative?

When it comes to core assignments, it's important to note that a given VM must have exclusive access to the assigned number of cores/threads *simultaneously* at a given moment in time, and also to remember that the hypervisor sometimes needs time to do stuff as well. This means that if a particular VM is assigned all or most of the cores available on a host, that VM will basically run solo and any computation by other VMs will require pausing the VM in question and switching it out for another one. This can actually result in _lower_ performance in practice because of the switching overhead. Every time the VM makes an I/O request, the whole VM has to be paused and let the hypervisor run for a bit to service that request; very inefficient! It's difficult with small core count processors like this, but whenever possible I target half-or-less of the available cores (or logical threads if not) to make sure the hypervisor can efficiently schedule multiple VMs to actually execute in true parallel. If you have 4 cores with hyperthreading, this means you have a maximum of 8 threads to work with. You can have 8 tasks "in flight" at once, but remember that hyperthreading isn't magic and you'll still take a (smaller) performance hit if you have multiple threads doing computation on one physical core too. As such, it's sometimes better to ignore hyperthreading and just do your numbers based on actual cores, but with processors this small that's often not practical. You could assign your VMs to 4 virtual cores each so they could run beside each other, but the hypervisor will occasionally switch one out to do its own processing. Even better is to assign 2-3 cores per VM if the VMs are not especially heavyweight (probably true in this case) so that you can have multiple VMs running in true parallel while still having a core/thread or two free for the hypervisor to handle stuff like I/O and networking calls. People often assign more cores than necessary to a given VM, and the people specifying requirements for a virtual machine are guilty of perpetuating this because their thinking is "more cores for my application, which is obviously the most important, is better!". In practice, many workloads can't meaningfully take advantage of more than a couple cores simultaneously, and you only need to up the core count if you see the VM is actually hitting 100% utilization for all of its assigned virtual cores.

Yeah, I couldn't get a Pi when I wanted to get into Home Assistant, so it's running on some spare parts I had lying around. An old PC case, Pentium Anniversary and 8GB of memory. It's a decent option, as low end "junk" PCs will run as fast or faster than a Pi. I may need to fiddle with the available power saving options to get my power draw that low, but it's barely idling most of the time.

Yes - I like my ARM on microcontrollers or whatever this Xtensa thing is for esp32 :) -- Currently re-doing someone's ARM design from 10 years ago who was using dual ARM7 processors. Very good design technically but the obvious answer for many situations now is x86. Especially when size/power is not as much of a concern. There are endless suppliers of ARM boards which are time and money pits. BE AWARE!

The other way you could install HA on a thin client is the "Advanced" method; in my view, it's actually not that tricky to do at all, as the instructions are included on the main HA site. That has enabled me to run HA on a full debian 11 SSD drive attached via USB3 to the thin client, and also IOTSTACK runs too (& on a pretty low spec thin client)

Migrated to a HP ProDesk 600 G4 SFF (i7-8700) with 48GB. Running Arch with a windows VM, HA and other docker containers. Find it idles/averages around ~15w normally but will spike nearly 4x under load. Overall very happy with the performance/power tradeoff from a m93p/pi arrangement. Can also throttle CPU performance to cap power consumption spikes 'cpupower frequency-set -g powersave' etc

Nice video! However I think a home automation server should not require a i5+8GB RAM that consumes 10W+. That just shows how inefficient the whole setup is. At the end of the day a home automation server just collects and stores sensor data and triggers some switches using pretty simple logic.

I did the same with refurbished notebooks. The display can be shut down via software, UPS is included (and in case of the big three manufacturers can be bought as spare parts for years!), plus it has decent loudspeakers and can give proper alerts, for example if something is out of normal with the cistern. It got me uptimes of two years instead of two weeks.

At 13:00, I noticed that the PiBuilder scripts were throwing up errors on your install because of dependencies like raspi-config that can't be satisfied if you're not running Raspberry Pi OS. I built my own Debian AMD64 environment in Parallels on an Intel Mac and set about fixing PiBuilder issues as I noticed them. Things like not having raspi-config mostly failed safe, in the sense that no harm was done, if not in the sense that an intended change (eg WiFi country code) was not applied. More significant was the absence of rsync which is needed for some PiBuilder merge operations; those were failing. I've just pushed revisions to PiBuilder which deal with all the issues I found. I don't know if you want to start over with a clean build but it's there if you want it. I was also able to restore a backup taken on a Pi and, aside from the Node-RED devices, it just worked. Good video.

This is not an "excellent replacement "for rpi, rpi is much smaller. The cheapest and equally good replacement is a cheap TV Box with Android for $10 and uploading Linux there, e.g. Ubuntu. Anyway, very good video!

16:07 for lower power consumption its good to disable cores in bios after installing everything and use just bare minimum for vms.

You can build a real proxmox cluster from 2 servers, also if you add zfs file storage on both servers you can sync VMs between servers using proxmox replication, even if one server die you can spin up VM on another server. All you need in such case set quorum from 2 to 1, and move VM config to another dir on a healthy server.

Looks like a good candidate for learning ansible.Cheers

i use a dell thin client computer which you can get for around 150 USD It works a lot better then a pi much faster and as you said about the lenovo everything is contained inside the frame. Been using this over almost 2 years now and has worked very well indeed.

I just hate how raspberry have almost no documentation on stuff that normies don’t care like how to use all of the connections, like half of the plugs are just “hdmi output” and nothing else

I also replaced all but one Pi that i had running with Fujitsu Futro S740 Thinclients. Depending on RAM/SSD/Accessories I bought them for 30-40€ each. All of them including a case, some without a psu, as I am using them with a 12V 2A PoE Splitter (which works fine, as the mainboard has a wide input range, even when fujitsu specifies it for their standard 19v supply). Power usage (running proxmox, even the 4gb one) is between 4 and 10W. One is used as a central gateway for zigbee/zwave/bluetooth and mounted in the attic, the other one is responsible for homeassistant exclusively, but I am still using proxmox for easy management and snapshots. In the same go I also replaced my two Fujitsu TX1320 M3 SFF Servers with a single Lenovo M90q with a i5 10500T, which is faster then both of them together, while only using 30W with all my homelab stuff running. The only Pi left is attached to a waveshare touchscreen as a smarthome wall panel, also supplied by poe (using a waveshare poe shield with additional 12v out), as I need some IO pins there.

How can one do IoT without IPMI? Would need two of them, one acting as "BMC" to the other. But mini-ITX solutions from Supermicro or Asrock are more expensive than even two Rpis.

I ran Home Assistant Core on a RPi 2, up until the last few updates that wouldn't install correctly. I had no other use for the thing and thought I'd torture it. Up until recently, it didn't mind. And you can find an RPi4, but may as well buy a NUC for the prices they want. RIP RPI.

Another interesting option is to use an old phone with Postmarketos Linux. I use a Motorola G3 (2015) as Home Assistant/ espHome server with docker. See this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0HemPRAq7dc.html

i also upgraded from the pi's to the thinclients. have been running a m73 with docker containers for years. it has been working flawless.

I've been moving to containers. Not sure what I'll do with the PIs yet but they will find purpose again!

Thanks Andreas for this interesting video

pi's are 150$ alone, plus whatever you need extra, theres orange pi 5 presale for less then 100$ for 8gb model

Yep, did exactly this. SSD included. Good RAM. And well built!

The timing of this video couldn’t have come any more perfectly. I just bought myself a fell optiplex for my HA! Just waiting on the power cord and I’ll be following along with your video a second time to get it up and running.

If you are looking for Pis, might check out rpi locator. It keeps track of when and where are Pi Models in Stock at legitimate vedors. I got my Pi4 in August trough there. However, you still need to get lucky, especially if you need a specific model. Tough then again, if you are looking for a server, a cheap used PC is propably the better solution anyway. As I only got the 2GB model, I'm running out of memory and my CPU also often spikes. I was allready looking for such devices those past days. If you are *very* lucky and find a Pi Zero at vendor prices, might as well grab one. They are dirt cheap if not sold at scalper prices, they consume extremely little power and are ideal for very lightweight server tasks.

Ventoy is the best tool for boot image management for usb stick - you can have multiple iso and select the one you need on startup. BTW, you can find great deals on 1L PC on tutti also ;-) Just got my first - HP G2 6th gen i5, 8GB ram, 256SSD for 130chf But I am hoping to have it running proxmox and Ubuntu server with Docker for HA, zigbee2MQTT and mosquito, probably pihole as well. With Sonoff dongle plus running 7.1.1.0_115200.gbl

I'm also running my HomeAssistant on a brand new HP EliteDesk 800 G3 DM with an i5-6500, 16GB ram I bought in Ricardo (stock clearance sale). I found the Raspberry Pi 4 for Influx/Grafana on the lower edge to run on. With the Elite Desk it’s perfect and power consumption goes down to is 6.5-7W which is excellent. There is an easier way to bring the HomeAssistant on the internal disk without removing it or the need for an adaptor. I use the Ventoy boot solution to stage almost any PC/server with any OS. I have a SATA disk with USB adapter, installed Ventoy on it and stored all the images I need on the disk. For HomeAssistant you just boot a live linux, download Etcher and flash the internal drive - done. If you need more sophisticated disk tools, Hiren’s BootCD is your friend. Always great to see your videos!

I use a Odroid-M1 with 8GB RAM. Available, about 100€ in Price (plus 50€ for m2 ssd). HA run in a docker environment. Can run with my 12V Supply and uses less than 5W of power with typical workload.

The viewer comments here are amazing, as this video demonstrates.

refurb i7 is the deal you want for expandability and much more ram capacity plus much better performance - the 6/7th gen have low idle power usage - sbc/minis re lacjing and arm has no clear roadmap but they are getting much better - 2023 should see more arm chips but also lower costs for refurbs - more ram makes all the difference and nvme and faster network options

Most of those Lenovo PCs have Intel vPro feature included. You can access console, mount ISOs, change BIOS settings remotely. Another convenient feature!

Very interesting option, I was thinking what should I do with the Home Assistant install that nowadays claims the entire machine just for itself. Thanks a lot for the clear (as always!) video. One thing that is really important for me and I was hoping to see/hear about (I thought you were close at 14:35, 15:20, 15:34 and 16:20): is there any fan noise with these thin client PCs while running the lot (i.e. proxmox, Home Assistant, IOTstack, Zigbee2MQTT and NodeRed)? I could move HA to a second Pi4 since I already have it (hard to believe that I was able to buy a new one this summer at a decent price) and everything else I need for it and it is dead silent with the extruded aluminium case, however I'd rather consolidate HA and everything else IOTstack on a single machine to keep the traffic between the machines in the virtual environment rather than on the physical LAN. Also, I guess proxmox would provide more convenient backup approaches. BTW, at 12:39-12:45 unnecessary use of sudo was spotted :) You always want the most efficient solutions, why not do it in software as well?

If you will deploy more servers in future, you might need PXE server for network installation. Dnsmasq will do the job, it can work as DNS, DHCP and TFTP server, which is nice combo for PXE in small network. Running PVE cluster & linstor in production environment for a few years - harder to setup, but worth it.

I agree. Every time a project does not specifically require GPIO, I run it under Proxmox on a mini PC. In my case a couple-year-old NUC. You can fit an amazing amount of LXC containers on a 32GB NUC. Because of the types of services I run, CPU is rarely an issue. I actually tend on run into more issues with USB contention.

Considering you have my age and background I again am amazed by your weekly achievements! Even in Linux and alike. Great job! Grüzi from Holland :)

Thank you for great overview.. seems that this way solves many near future issues of mine in an ecosystem with weather stations, telescope control etc.

I have been using hp microserver (gen7 gen8) at home for years, with OS Unraid (VM, docker .. ), today raspberry pi prices are absurd, I bought too a very small mini pc... ( Beelink T4), you give me some ideas how better use it, thank you :)

That fancy multimeter of yours ... Is that home made power input/output in epoxy? Is that permanent or removable?

My tiny Lenovo additionally runs LXC-containers for LMS(Squeezebox-Server), Unify, Pihole and Edomi-Visu. Edomi ist available as a Proxmox-LXC-Container template from knx-user-forum, which is ready to use out of the box and can be installed in a minute. Everything is nicely separated and one application will not compromise the others in case anything goes wrong. All my raspies have been retired a year ago and I never want to go back ... Thanks for great videos, always inspiring!

I found a new 1200cc little car scare but it's a bit more expensive the Lamborghini Diablo but it will surely run more

I use PC Engines APU2. 4 cores, multiple gigabit interfaces, data and pcie storage, small, passive cooling, WiFi possible too. It is actually made in Switzerland, I think in Zurich. I have like 20 of them for various projects. the use like 5W which is really good. Prices did increase a bit tho last year, and max ram is 4GB. But indeed used thin client can be cheaper, if you count also storage and case. I got my APU2 boxes like 5 years ago, so it was a good deal then. Now there are better options. Pc engines are planning new APU version, but it takes time. Their strategy is long term support for industrial and telecommunications industries.

Thanks for prompting me to look into Proxmox - I have now installed it on an Optiplex Mini and run several VMs (including HAOS) on it. I cannot imagine ever going back to RPi. While investigating further, I also decided to give TurnKeyLinux (Debian based) a go -- and I am impressed by the clean, lean and stable appliances. The most fundamental one is "TurnKey Core" (339MB) which would be a good base to install IOTstack on. Question: What is the reasoning behind running Mosquitto in a separate VM from HAOS? Keeping the door open for an alternative to HA or something else?

@Mr. Spiess: In Proxmox, I overbook the CPUs. This means, I assign max. number of CPUs per VM where needed (If you run a windows variant which uses limited CPU cores, there is no benefits using more cores). But I do not overbook RAM. It is possible with the balloon-driver, but it might cause swapping to HDD/SSD so there will be performance penalty. Overbooking CPU might cause penalty, this is where you should keep an eye on the CPU usage of the system. But most of the time, CPUs are idle (this is where the concept of virtualization saves energy by consolidation). For your setup, you can use up all available CPUs for each VM and divide the memory (minus 1 GB for Proxmox) equally over the VMs. I have had better performance with "Default (kvm64)" CPU type than with any other CPU types on Linux based VMs. BR

I've been using a Lenovo like that for a couple of years. It just works

usff are just great but envinroment and TDP wise it would be best to utilize all trashed around mobile phones which we have dozens in our houses. root, debloat to pure linux and utilize with entware. stacking with Vt not yet so popular but phisical stacking with glue - why not (same wallplug)?

Really liked it. I went for a Cloud solution. But I am tempted to buy a cheap server. Proxmox is almost an overkill. Docker is good enough for almost any Stack. Runs on any minimal Linux, slight preference for 8086 but really most runs on Arm.