Home Assistant Server

[Pdagger]

I've been watching The Hookup on youtube and trying to get my own ultimate home network setup.

I'd like to get Home Assistant set up on a server in my house to run all of my IoT devices. From the video it sounds like some people run it on a Raspberry Pi, but he mentions that it's more reliable on a dedicated server/PC.

What would be the ideal hardware to run Home Assistant on?

I have a Synology NAS (RS1619xs+), can I just run it on there? Or would I be better off with dedicated hardware?

 

[ComputerBox34]

There are 3 ways to run it.

-RPi
-Virtual Machine on an x86 based server
-Container(s)

I've deployed both directly on the RPi and on VM. The VM is an "all in one" package that actually runs their own proprietary OS. (I think it's now called HomeAssistant OS, previously HASSOS) The entire application is containerized within the OS with "core" being it's own container and each plug-in being a separate container. Their OS stiches them all together.

Keep in mind that if you plan on deploying ZWave devices, you will need to use a Pi no matter what to relay the ZWave controller data back to the HASS host. I'm currently doing this with socat and ser2net. It's probably possible to get a USB based zwave controller as well and pass that IO through from your hypervisor to VM but my server is not located in an ideal location for the ZWave transceiver.

Bottom Line: RPi is the easiest implementation. VM is the next difficult. I am going to say running HASS in your own containers is probably the most difficult as I was never sure how you should stich all of the homeassistant containers together on your own but I'm sure there are guides out there.