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

Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, but probably also next year. So, we have to have a strategy to survive without new Raspberry boards. Sometimes, a problem can be a chance. This is what we will see today. Stay tuned if you want to get a cheaper, faster, and prettier Raspberry replacement. Spoiler alert: It will be “Back to the Future.”
Links:
Fujitsu: ebay.us/VyIeAz
I5 Lenovo: ebay.us/ZtXI7G or amzn.to/3gj6MlH
I7 Lenovo: ebay.us/j0R7sl
i3 Lenovo: amzn.to/3Aoae5p
mSATA Adapter: s.click.aliexp... (not tried)
HA Installation: • How To Install Home As...
Debian installation: • Running a Debian 11 Bu...
The links above are usually affiliate links that support the channel (at no additional cost to you).
Commands and links:
Debian Live
cdimage.debian...
Home Assistant
github.com/hom...
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y efibootmgr
sudo efibootmgr -c -l /EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI -L HomeAssistant
su
sudo usermod -aG sudo pi
sudo service ssh start
exit
~/PiBuilder/boot/scripts/01_setup.sh
~/PiBuilder/boot/scripts/02_setup.sh
~/PiBuilder/boot/scripts/03_setup.sh
~/PiBuilder/boot/scripts/04_setup.sh
~/PiBuilder/boot/scripts/05_setup.sh
cd ~/IOTstack
./menu.sh
lsusb
ls /dev/ttyA*
nano ~/IOTstack/docker-compose.yml
github.com/Par...
Proxmox helpers: tteck.github.i...
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[@rklauco]

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 :)

[@cedricjung1899]

I was wondering how well will it be in the year, is it reliable ? What about about the consumption with i5 ?

[@AndreasSpiess]

Interesting! Indeed, they do not have a value as a laptop.

[@JohnBaxendale]

Great tip! I did run an old i7 laptop as a server for a long time (~3 years in a very dusty environment) and it was great. I had a docking station for it which made the IO much easier too. As you say, the built in UPS was super handy too! :)

[@rapjul]

@@cedricjung1899 It’s just a normal laptop, no reason why there should be any additional issues. There are two main power envelopes for the CPUs in laptops: - 15 W (processors that end in “U”) - 45 W (processors that end in “H” or “HQ”; these traditional had four cores hence the ‘Q’ for quad, but since 2018 can have more than four cores) Even 15 W CPUs from 10 years ago should still be more powerful than a RPi 4. Get something like a Lenovo Thinkpad, HP ZBook/Elitebook, or Dell Precision/Latitude for the almost certain guarantee of user replaceable memory and storage, and an included Ethernet port (which is pretty much impossible to get on thinner, non-business laptops anymore). If you can, try to get a laptop with 1 × 8 GB of RAM so you can fill the other SODIMM slot with another 8 GB for a cheaper upgrade to 16 GB later.

[@enjibkk6850]

Would you recommend brands? The life expectency of my laptops have varied a lot across the decades, I would be wary to buy 2nd hand (half broken 😉). Laptop form factor is not ideal to just stick them behind the TV cabinet along with the hue bridge

[@jmize]

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).

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad you like my content. An these Thin clients with Proxmox are really cool. I do not look back to the Raspberry.

[@kemai.adventures]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed, I like their looks too. Mine sits now above my PC on the shelf!

[@xtremeideaz]

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

[@sc0or]

I can tell you a secret. You can install ALL this software on a single PC and forget about it for ages. People are crazy about a virtualization like about a new iPhone when 5 yo model can cover all use cases. I completely understand that installing a new virtual machine is like purchasing a new hardware, but this is only a psychology

[@smyle78]

Why do you need proxmox for this?

[@haveaniceday7950]

@@sc0or how do you do it?

[@dirkbetscheider2368]

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. 😃

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your explanations. I just checked my CPUs. They all run at around 1GHz with IOTstack and HA up. So it seems that Proxmox can tune them down when not used (governor: ondemand).

[@tyrzxv]

Just my 2 cents: I have a supermicro Intel Xeon with 32gb ECC RAM running 24/7 with 8 HGST drives and an ssd, with idle wattage around 60 watts, running mostly stock bios settings. Although this is definitely not as low as you are going for, this seems low to me considering the constant running drives. It's mainly a storage NAS, running freenas/truenas and ZFS. I think at some point, when you have larger or more capable server hardware, the bare minimum wattage will be higher than smaller Raspberry Pi or minimalist consumer pc, but if you upscale the hardware attached, the server hardware becomes more efficient for what's running. This is just using my own experiences with the hardware ive used to make various servers. Edit: I should have added, using the right size power supply makes a huge difference, and since the hardware that's constantly running (harddrives) is going to be the majority of the idle wattage.... it's easier for it to hit that power supply efficiency range. The lower the wattage your going for, the more percentage of your wattage is waste-conversion wattage for just having the power supply on.

[@pietstreet8311]

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.

[@akiko009]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the additions. It just took me a few hours to update all the BIOS in my Lenovos. Not easy. As you said: They were from 2013...

[@ilyai746]

if you purchase some like hp probook (i have HP ProBook 6360b x2 + proxmox ) , you got server with ups... Power down will not touch...New hp probook no so nice

[@akiko009]

@@ilyai746 I like the idea. On the downside I've had difficulties with the embedded controller on some laptops going out to lala land and taking the unit with it. Those things don't have the most solid firmware.

[@ManfredBartz]

​@@ilyai746, I did that for a while -- until the battery runtime was down to 30 seconds....

[@ManfredBartz]

@akiko009: "mini PCs ... instead of RPis because of the more reliable storage setup" -- totally agree. I could never get an RPi to reliably work with an SSD even though I spent extra bucks buying a "supported" SATA to USB adapter. And SD-card operation is only viable if the SD is made read-only.

[@sayantansantra2332]

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.

[@anonymoususer6448]

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 KZbinrs. As a real engineer, analyzing all aspects, including computing long term power costs Love it ! /chrisV

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your kind words!

[@oscargr_]

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.😁😁

[@dmanwithers]

Been running it in Proxmox for 2 years now without issues. Been nice because I have one server running 5 or 6 machines right now. Want to do more, but need to upgrade the RAM before I can do so. Probably going to build a bigger server instead though, since mine is an old R510 anyway

[@AndreasSpiess]

I was also astonished about the comments. It shows that time is right now.

[@oscargr_]

@@AndreasSpiess Thanks for always keeping me moving on (with the crowd)😁😁

[@FilipeNeto616]

Been running HA in a Pi4 for several years. At the begining was painfull, in particular due to power outages/hard powerdowns and SD degradation. Over the time I've been improving those handicaps by replacing the SD cards with SSD drives and using an UPS to avoid hard shutdowns. But Pi4 don't allow me to use VMs (or is hard to), so anytime I need to do some test deployments I end-up buying a new Pi for that purpose. So today was the day I finally move on and placed an order to get a new Lenovo M75n. It's not cheap, but hopefully it will allow me to setup as many as test enviroments as I need and keep running my HA stack. Thank you all for that!

[@oscargr_]

@@FilipeNeto616 oh my.. that sounds like an upgrade over an upgrade. I don't know how many devices you control in your mansion, but it seems like a super setup. If you re that willing to upgrade, must be you love home assistant. I m not there yet. Who knows in a few years, after I have moved all my hand made automations over to home assistant. Struggling with yaml.😅

[@ScottBot2000]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool. Waiting for a power cord is an interesting problem, BTW ;-)

[@johnlh100]

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!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your experience. And I learned that Edomi exists ;-)

[@aliaghil1]

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. 😊

[@AndreasSpiess]

Sounds great!

[@kemai.adventures]

what is the self backup system and how does it work?

[@NickReynolds]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

SAme here. Two Pis recently died, and I do not have too many left ;-)

[@als1023]

Excellent video, very good format, the style and substance will build this channel. Thanks you for posting ! Thank you to the YT algo for suggesting this segment !! And thank you especially for all the great comments and subscribers, this is a warehouse of very smart people !!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed, I have very smart viewers :-)

[@omardude39]

I love how I still understood exactly what you meant when you said you will always "sit in the first row" (it's "have a front row seat"), it's close enough! 😄

[@brian2590]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool. Maybe I try a cluster too. I have now enough HW ;-)

[@kokoscom]

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!

[@giornikitop5373]

this debate has been done to death. while there are similar arm boards in cost and performance, none of them can even touch rpi's software and user base. going x86 with mini pcs or similar is a usual solution if you are willing to give up the versatility of arm sbcs in size and power consumption. BUT, the prices for all those minis are nowhere near what most youtubers claim to be and are largely depended on geolocation. so, you either go for arm for less size, power and generally price or x86 for bigger perf. cost, power and size. there is currently no in-between.

[@davidlloyd1526]

For me the number 1 problem is Linux driver support, something that all the comparisons ignore. They always just download junk like RaspbianOS or random binaries from dodgy websites in China. At least in this video he just downloaded Debian. I don't want to buy a board where the graphics chipset has no Linux drivers...

[@arm-power]

What about to use SBC with new RK3588 chip with famous ARM Cortex A76? - prices starts at $60 USD for Orange Pi 5, Radxa Rock 5 etc. - Cortex A76 is 1st desktop class ARM core (IPC equal to PC AMD Zen 1 or Intel Skylake i7) - Cortex A76 has double IPC than older A72 in RPi4 - RK3588 has 4x A76 at 2.4 GHz .... 50% clocks increase * 2.0 IPC = 3 times higher performance (single core) - RK3588 has also 4x little A55 core at 1.8 GHz .... these alone provides same performance as whole RPi4 (4x A72 @ 1.5 GHz) - overall 4x higher performance - 8nm LP Samsung process (compared to 28nm for RPi4 = huge difference in consumption for identical load) - up to 16 GB RAM (4GB, 8GB options) - 1x PCIe slot for native NVME SSD, or eMMC

[@keithmiller9665]

See my post for a Beelink U59 Pro N5105, much better than Pi 4. Important to add in all the costs to get a Pi 4 up and running.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I also think that the Pi foundation is in a powerful situation. Linux, unfortunately, is not as standardized as Windows.

[@diegoeche]

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

[@PLANTROON]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree, Laptops are also a good solution.

[@hikefka8001]

Sometimes you got good dealers who sell refurbished corporate laptops for so cheap!

[@AkramButNot]

@@AndreasSpiess and also they have a battery, which is reaaaally useful when a power outage occurs. They can survive without an UPS as they run on battery. And, that's convenient for some semi-critical missions that you can still run, for example, sending a Telegram alert when power is down.

[@jonmayer]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

These small PCs fortunately are very power efficient. In my setup I hardly measured any difference when I replaced my 2 Pis with this very old Thin Client PC. And, as said: I am the proud owner of a PV...

[@jonmayer]

@@AndreasSpiess You've convinced me to give my Celeron J4125 mini PC I bought awhile ago a chance at running instead of my Pi(s). I was using it for something else, but I think this application is better.

[@GeoffSeeley]

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!

[@AndreasSpiess]

So you got a very good deal!

[@maak6270]

Yep. I got a HP T620 (4-core) with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD, for $50. It runs Proxmox + HA, with bunch of containers, i.a. ebusd (Vaillant heating), SDR-RTL (433Hz radio sensors), gates/door control, lots of zigbee/bluetooth stuff, etc. The PC mostly sits at 1% CPU and uses like 9W. Super quiet (no fan). Perfect!

[@MrCWoodhouse]

Thanks, as always, Andreas! I always learn something new. This time ProxMox, PiBuilder and IOTStack. I just last week migrated from a Pi-4 to an old MacMini 2011 running Debian 11 Bullseye and HA Supervised. I can hear my footsteps echoing down the halls of this empty minicomputer mansion with one little home assistant instance running in a watercloset. Time to load it up with more apps. 73s

[@AndreasSpiess]

Interesting, that you still can use a 2011 MAC. That is good news for the environment ;-)

[@MrCWoodhouse]

@@AndreasSpiessMacOS at High Sierra is unusable because you cannot run any modern apps at all, so you have to load Linux. I might switch over to your setup since HA Supervisor does not want anything else, even Portainer, running in its Docker engine, so it flags the install as "unhealthy" unless you disable the health check. Frenck addressed this directly as their design intent. Your setup provides 2 independent Docker engines; one in the HA Native VM, and the other in the IOTsatck VM. Great!

[@JAAPOP8]

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 :)

[@AndreasSpiess]

It needs some dedication. And a lot of time ;-)

[@t.w.3]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So you are a lucky guy. With some cases of PCs...

[@blowfly71]

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

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool setup!

[@hcjkruse]

Did you use the extra PCIe slots for NVMe adapters? I only have experience with Prodesk and Elitedesk mini G4. I am considering a modern Prodesk sff as a replacement for an Haswell era system. Also might want to use an sff for gaming.

[@blowfly71]

@@hcjkruse has one NVME slot and SATA. Could use low rise PCI->NVME too though if I need extra

[@BredihinKA]

Good night. I have been tormented for several years with several servers on raspberries. First, a bunch of services on one or two raspberries. Several times I broke some services while updating others. Then I figured out Docker on a raspberry, and life became easier, but problems with a bunch of wires, a bunch of usb drives, additional fans, and bad contacts finished me off. Among other things, it lay on the shelf in the form of a ball of wires and caused fear and horror among relatives. As a result, I assembled a small computer on AMD Ryzen 3700, and installed a hypervisor on it, just like you. A couple of years have passed since then. The server has been overgrown with a Raid controller, an additional network card and a bunch of disks, but it still works stably and does not scare people with its appearance. And of course, it is much faster than a pack of raspberries ... I'll leave them for other projects ...

[@AndreasSpiess]

So we are on a parallel path...

[@timj3784]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Nice setup! I think that current energy prices will influence many homelab owners...

[@sebastien4116]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Orange Pis are good computers. However, I did the price calculation for power in the video. And after replacing my 2 Pis with my old I7 PC I hardly noticed an increase of power consumption.

[@sebastien4116]

@@AndreasSpiess I guess my point was: if you need to run a sever 24/7 at home, you may want to use the most efficient board/PC available, to reduce wattage/electricity cost. It's probably neither a Raspberry Pi 4 (or two of those) or a i7 PC. Those are probably overkill in performance for most people's needs, and therefore consuming more watts than necessary for the job. Of course, if you want to run Plex, Jellyfin, do some transcoding etc. then more powerful machines are required, but people would be surprised on what you can run reasonably well on a low end, low power Orange Pi (or earlier Raspberry Pis).

[@SlykeThePhoxenix]

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.

[@johncrunk8038]

Wow. The link to tteck is the greatest help.I have used Proxmox for many years and never found that github page. Thank you!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad it helped!

[@RockFordCademce]

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.

[@peter2327]

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.

[@erboy5546]

did you measure power consumption

[@peter2327]

@@erboy5546 varies wildly depending on what is running on it. it is a TP t440. pulling the optical drive did help, changing the RAM did help, pulling the keyboad did help onky a little, and using a minimal linux without many systemservices helps, too.

[@erboy5546]

@@peter2327 thanks for answering

[@peter2327]

@@erboy5546 I forgot to mention: there were two different power supply sizes available for it: a 40W and a 90W(?, not sure, for docking stations). I am running on an aftermarket 40W one, because my original 40W PS had a high frequency hiss to it)

[@SmithyScotland]

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.....

[@AndreasSpiess]

The commercial market probably depends more on the HW if they included it in their products. We are "just" hobbyists :-(

[@JTordur]

The situation with the supply chain crisis is very difficult. I don't think Raspberry Pi could do anything differently. This will blow over soon, but unfortunately we have to wait until we can build all of our cool project using RPi for a while.

[@RK-kn1ud]

@@JTordur I think that preferring one customer over another (instead of taking orders as they come in) will likely result in their demise.

[@JTordur]

@@RK-kn1ud I don't think so, no-one currently is ready to take their position in the market. They have an eco-system, of hardware and software around their devices, that is hard to beat. I get why they probably have customers they prioritise, they probably have customers relying on the Compute Modules in their products, and tbh. either piss of some entitled hobbyists with long lead times, or let business build on your product go out of business? I know what I would have chosen.

[@RK-kn1ud]

@@JTordur I don't think you should ever turn down a customer who is willing to pay. It's not like they have a shortage of customers willing to pay. There is no competition now, but there may be of somebody wants to capitalize on the customers that are being purposely ignored.

[@PieceMaker]

Dear guy with the Swiss accent, thank you for your videos. I ordered a S920, booted with USB-Debian Live but Balena Etcher only showed an empty white window. Repeated the process with xUbuntu Live, Balena worked this time but system didn't boot. "sudo efibootmgr -c -l /EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI -L HomeAssistant" replied with "EFI variables are not supported on this system". Finally "sudo efibootmgr --create --disk=/dev/sda --part=1 --label="HAOS" --loader='EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi'" made my system bootable and everthing is working now. Thanks again and have a good one!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool. Thank you for reporting your solution!

[@julesd]

Finally... I have been proved to be ahead of the curve!!!! I am using a DELL FX160 ... it was originally sold by dell as a thin client, but i put an SSD in it and installed debian no problem... I have been using for HA for 2+ years now... it works really well.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thanks for sharing!

[@remy44444]

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.

[@khriss75]

yessss this is like my solution: a free second hand hp i5 128Giga SSD,laptop (4 years old). Laptop (and relative power supply) + friztbox modem + 12V 10A power supply and relative LiFePO4 battery backup + sesnsor, my home automation pcb boards etc = about 22W

[@AndreasSpiess]

Also a good alternative!

[@dogemaster6079]

can confirm, i have had an old t460 running all of my iot stuff and it has been rock solid. easily >10w typical and built in kvm + ups is really nice.

[@mortensentim511]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool. I hope your power measurements is ok. I saw that those plugs were not very accurate in the low-level area (video will follow).

[@AuchEinBenutzername]

Hi, thanks for this video, it works so smoothly. I bought a used PC, installed proxmox, created a VM with home assistant and within a few hours everything was working. Thanks 😊

[@AndreasSpiess]

Great to hear!

[@oscargr_]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many other viewers went with NUCs. Seem to be a good choice.

[@oscargr_]

@@AndreasSpiess Yeah, and not that much more expensive than a raspberry... If for the Rasp. you re going to need a case, a power supply, a memory and an SSD upgrade... Looking back, it's hard to remember why lots of people wanted to run it on a berry. Must have been exceptionally good marketing by the rasp foundation. Edit: who are doing a good job I am sure at providing cheap computers for educational and other purposes. Which is obvious by that they produce tons of boards for industry and that's why there hardly any left for home-hobby-users.

[@duncanowino7653]

@Oscar Gr which particular NUC did you get?

[@oscargr_]

@@duncanowino7653 Note that I only just have it, so my HA install is new and rather small. So far so good. BNUC11ATKC20RA0 Processor N4505 (2 core), 4G RAM, 250GSSD They were rather a good deal here(without any OS preinstalled), but I see they are about 200 US$ in US.

[@rkan2]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Maybe I have to try one in the future.

[@jorgwende6314]

Their only limitation: interfaces …

[@oscargr_]

What do you use those for in practice?

[@rkan2]

@@oscargr_ Anything you'd use a 5W TDP CPU from 2015 for.. RPi 4 is 28nm. M3-6Y30 was on a much newer 14nm process and it was a 280$ CPU back then. There is also much better value Atom CPUs but they might still not offer the same single core performance. Of course the major limitation is RAM on board but it is still plenty to run a few containers or even full on Win10 of course.

[@mattivirta]

not have alternative. were have gpios ? no can use 90% all projects if not have gpio.

[@AndyPayne42]

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!

[@AndreasSpiess]

I decided to go with mainstream for things which are not important for my live. This so far saved me a lot of time I was able to spend for interesting projects. I am not the "infrastructure maintainer type"...

[@AndyPayne42]

@@AndreasSpiess Standards (even bulky x86) should not be under appreciated. But I think you understand infrastructure more than most programmers - a lot of new programmers live very far away from the hardware/software infrastructure by always being on top of high level abstractions (containers, virtualization, etc..) but if they were taught in grade school more basic Linux skills like commands and services then the world would be a better place - the alternative is letting Amazon/Google/Microsoft control it all.

[@rogerschmid8612]

i compared price and power in 2020 as the pi's where available in masses, i needed a firewall for a client doing even small iot stuff, bit he convinced me using a PI4 well usb ethernet adapter or vlan trunk to a switch ? usb hardware is never stabil like real hardware. i installed an netgear 8 port switch at the end i could start installing .. first trouble mtu of the pi for the trunk never worked biger than 1500 (under raspian), well reduced the mtu on the untagged ports of the switch to 1496 :( then quickly arrived the whish to share an HD for datashare, (usb) then problem with the flash .. letting iot scrap frequently will end up in a short happyness, therefore an usb ssd was needed .. at the end powerconsumption if all was 18W and and the price with an case for the raspi and all parts 360.- and 3 power sockets ... and no battery backup same setup with one of the popular J1900 4 lan box including 4gb ram and 128gb SSD same size as the netgear switch was running 9W, as this is a 4 core even proxmox would work flawless. Price was 280.- (including an 12V powersupply with build in battery). the firewall with nat and 25 rules passed from wan to lan linespeed (1Gb) with CPU just idling on 5% the PI4 maxed out on 450mbit

[@JohnBCurtix]

Got myself a free NUC from my employer a while ago and it's brilliant at being a Proxmox machine, added a 500GB SSD for storage and it's working like a charm. I run a lot of LXC containers, these are brilliant, however I am now trying to learn more about docker. LXC containers are definitely something to look at, I wouldn't run docker in them, however they can easily replace most Linux VM's and its very easy to deploy Turnkey Linux apps on them!

[@AndreasSpiess]

For the moment I am happy it runs like that. But I am sure there are opportunities as you describe...

[@mikrom]

I ran HA on a Raspberry years ago. Then I bought NUC running Kodi and HA under Ubuntu, but it was hard to backup all my projects, and if I screw up one thing, all was broken. So I installed Debian with Proxmox on top of it on my NUC last year. (because I needed Kodi/HDMI). Now I have separate turnkey lxc container for each project and HA as VM. All containers (adguard, docker, Haas,... ) are backed up to the NAS every night 😎

[@AndreasSpiess]

I wonder how the database backup works if you do it from the VM level. No data corruption? I use influx Backup to be sure.

[@sky1nax]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I never looked into these boxes. Maybe in the future...

[@siberx4]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your considerations. Very helpful!

[@raimocom]

While nothing said here is wrong, it has no measurable effect on the kind of workload we are looking at. These kind of setups run almost always at idle cpu loads. VM context switching is not a factor to consider here. Furthermore most containers will be LXC or Docker anyway. So just process isolation via Linux cgroups. Which is in the end the plain standard process context switching. So i´m happily just assign all physical cores to these very few VMs/containers and let the CPU microcode, Linux kernel scheduler and QEMU virtualization layer micro manage. They are much smarter than me.

[@ckirkyg]

I'd like to add that memory in proxmox is alot less forgiving. You should only allocate vm and lxv containers system memory 1 for 1 not as if it's shared across the processes drawing from system memory. You can over provision processors quite a bit and run many containers drawing resources from those same cores.

[@andymok7945]

Very good video. Started with Rpi3 many years ago for HA. After 2 microSD failures and tired of the long boot times I switched to running HA on Proxmox and it was wonderful. Middle of this year I switched to a much better machine running Proxmox as the Brick PC had limited resources and I needed to add more VMs. Iam currently doing a changeover of HA. I have my test setup running HA in the HA Blue hardware, with just HA running alone with the odd add-on. I then bought a micro-PC (HP 800 G3) with 16GB RAM, i5-6550T CPU, replaced the SSD with a bigger size and installed a NVMe SSD for boot and ISO storage. The micro-PC is running Proxmox and it will run all the extra apps to be used for HA. I currently have MQTT and Node-Red running in separate LXC for each. Soon will be adding MQTT2Zigbee. I want isolation and if HA has to be rebooted, MQTT and such are still available. Many way to do the setup that is best for one's purpose.

[@AndreasSpiess]

With my setup, HA is separated, too. But not completely because I read the PV sensor with a HA add-on for example.

[@noweare1]

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

[@ronaldronald8819]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

For the moment I spent enough on HW ;-)

[@xDNightmarex]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Impressive installation. Would probably steel too much of my time ;-)

[@xDNightmarex]

@@AndreasSpiess once I'm getting into more and more automations and things (started with HA like 6 weeks ago, before all this was more or less playground mixed with work-prep) that will probably be the case for me vs. HA... way to much time one can sink into that to make "the perfect, smart home" :) Currently playing with "Seeed Studio ESP32C3" + ESPresence + EMQX mqtt broker.. have to admit, capable & cool piece of soft/hardware yet sooooooo tiny :D lovin' it.

[@cannesahs]

it is ServeTheHome, not Server :)

[@xDNightmarex]

@@cannesahs oops, corrected :)

[@digiblurDIY]

Had this same issue earlier this year with helping someone. I couldn't bring myself to using a slow Pi for them. USFF x86 refurbs are definitely the way. Welcome to the club!

[@AndreasSpiess]

With all the stuff I have now I can help others, too ;-)

[@sesl91]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree and bought one. Still, they are about double the price with not a lot of advantages over the i5 model

[@wonttellyoumyname8769]

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??😀

[@AndreasSpiess]

Maybe I will have a look at power saving. However, I am not sure if it is worth the time for me as a Linux noob. BTW: I hope you had an accurate power meter for these low power levels.

[@yekutielbenheshel354]

@@AndreasSpiess Linux on the desktop is pretty easy these days. I use and highly recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.3 or 21. In my opinion, Ubuntu made a bad decision regarding Flatpaks. Therefore, I have given up on "buntus". Being a Linux Mint noob these days is generally no problem for engineers. There's a little tinkering to do, but, frankly Linux Mint is hardly any different from Windows for most things an ordinary engineer needs to do. Rolling releases-such as Arch and Manjaro-are a huge waste of time unless someone wants to turn Linux into a time-consuming hobby.

[@keithmiller9665]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

That is a really good price!

[@AnthonyDeChiaro]

I recently picked up a 10th gen i5 Beelink for a k8s cluster and have been liking it so far. This video made me consider the idea of using those N5105 or similar models as a RPi4 replacement - I agree the price/performance target is pretty attractive for them.

[@JanisBebritis]

Nice review, liked it. I myself jumped from pi1 or 2 to atomic pi and it has worked for me for years now. It has it's advantages, I have HA, mosquito and few additional services wrapped in docker-compose scripts, all works nicely. The only thing i kind of did not appreciate in Your review was that You showed how to disable proxmox "nagging" screen, yet asked to support your channel right after that.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I thought I mentioned how you can support the project in the middle of the video...

[@desktorp]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

More than 50% of these boards are used in the industry... This is part of the current problem.

[@davidfarning8246]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Same here. CPUs run nearly idle.

[@tonybell1597]

Thanks Andreas, s perfectly timed video! Been looking to merge a pair of pi4’s … excellent!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool. Now you can go on!

[@Tom-vt8sp]

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!

[@AndreasSpiess]

I tried Ventoy and it worked ok for the Debian installation image. To install HA I found it was not a big help compared with how I did it :-(

[@Tom-vt8sp]

@@AndreasSpiess Interresting, I took me 5 min to install HA to the internal disk. I have no M.2 adapter and this was my only and easy way.

[@AndreasSpiess]

​@@Tom-vt8sp I also used a live Debian on a USB stick. So I don't know where I would have saved time. But for the Debian installation, it was faster.

[@jean-marcdelprat1201]

Good decision Andreas! mysellf I have replaced since 11 months 2 raspberries PI and an old PC by a 2nd Hand Lenovo tiny PC running a free ESXI hypervisor from VMWARE. Rock solid, no more SD cards burned, full control on RAM, Disk, and availability of snapshots. (runs HA, VITAL PBX, apache server and some other) - my choice of ESXI was because we use it in the office.

[@AndreasSpiess]

It is always good to have synergies with the day job. Both profit…

[@tobias6032]

Andreas, thanks for doing this video. With this step DIY home automation will move from the flying wire, bread board maker domain to a professional alternative. So greate!

[@AndreasSpiess]

The rest still will be DIY, I think...

[@zen6zen]

I have Fujitsu S920, 4 core, added 8GB RAM and 16GB SSD, changed thermal grease. Installed pfSense, added 2xNIC, works like charm, with Suricata and pfBlocker using only 10-20% RAM and processor. Now my local network is safe and ping is lower than on Wi-Fi router.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your setup!

[@tonisee2]

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.

[@ziomalZparafii]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I usually do not connect any sensors to my Pi because the "server" is not where the sensors are. This is why I use ESP32s for sensors and place them where the need is. Or I use Zigbee devices. But, as said: I still have projects for Pis and I am happy I have now 2 more free for those projects.

[@yekutielbenheshel354]

I'm glad this video has received 80K plus views. Good for you Andreas!

[@yekutielbenheshel354]

Now it's up to 269K plus views!

[@hjhhhjhjh9474]

I really appreciate your videos. You take your time and stay on point. Your English is very good. It has a good tempo and vocal control. I always learn valuable information from your videos, and implement them into my projects. Please continue your quality work. Thank you.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your kind words!

[@truckerallikatuk]

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.

[@peterboon1672]

Super video! helped me a lot! Because of it bought a mini PC (Dreamquest pro), installed Proxmox and moved my home assistant from RPI4 to the mini PC. All directions in video were spot on (except small change in qm disk import command).

[@AndreasSpiess]

Cool! I am glad your setup went smooth.

[@sharpfang]

I love how you pronunce IOT like coyote.

[@luigicicatiello3991]

Quanto amo i tuoi video!!! Semplici, diretti e consistenti. Questo video arriva al momento giusto. Non sapevo come rimpiazzare i miei raspberry...

[@AndreasSpiess]

Now you know ;-)

[@wayneperryman4146]

Back in 2019 I made this change to proxmox and I'll now never look back, so much more reliable and smoother. The only downside is it takes longer to boot.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I hope I do not need to boot my server often ;-)

[@jayzn1931]

I got a Thinkcentre M600 because of the ridiculous price for the pi on the used market/new. I am currently configuring PiHole, Nextcloud and OpenMediaVault on it. So far the idle is around 7Watts and under load it goes to 11 or something. But what uses more power are my HDDs anyways, which I have in separate cases. All around I am very happy I got this, and not an RPi. Thanks for the bonus tip and the other insights in this video!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad you are happy. I also did not look back...

[@BrandonJacobson]

I just decided to switch from OpenHab to Home Assistant. I guess I’ll build a little with the Rapsberry Pi 4 that I have and then remember this video when I need to expand and improve. Thank you for the timely video!!!

[@AndreasSpiess]

As you saw, the change will not be very difficult, and you will not lose data.

[@BrandonJacobson]

@@AndreasSpiess Thank you! I'm excited to try both.

[@michaelschafferAT]

I am currently working on replacing my Raspberry with such a PC for ioBroker and co. Great that you made the video.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad I could help!

[@tomreingold4024]

Good video. In January 2022, I bought a used Lenovo thinkcentre M72 USFF to run VMware. It’s working quite well. I’m surprised at how low prices are for used computers considering how hard it is to buy some models of new computers.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Some viewers complained that prices went up after this video :-(

[@tomreingold4024]

@@AndreasSpiess I suppose that can happen, but I suspect it's a short-term trend. I've noticed an overall downward trend since January, though I can't claim to have taken a good-sized sample.

[@technics6215]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

These DELL Wyse PCs are a good fit. They are not often sold here.

[@joelluth6384]

Great timing! I just decided yesterday that one holiday project will be to build a Proxmox server on some old hw and migrate my HA (currently on Docker).

[@AndreasSpiess]

Should be no big problem!

[@michaelgreaves2375]

HUUUUUSSSHHHHH!!!! You'll start a run on my favorite little machines!

[@dentonhess5810]

I love your point at 5:38. Better hardware all around.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed. They also look nice and tidy if I compare with my old RPi setup...

[@mormegil231]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I made the same observations during my recent tests. RAM added up, CPUs were used by the machine with the bigger need.

[@Clerence3]

Danke! Ich habe wirklich überlegt, was nun die alternative ist. Mit diesem Tip hast du mir sehr geholfen!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Gern geschehen.

I'm about to go down the same route. After problems with the cards I'm ready to put my HA on my proxmox. Thank you for this very informative video!

[@AndreasSpiess]

You are welcome!

[@sarahjanegray]

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

[@AndreasSpiess]

Maybe I will investigate in redundancy in the future. It is not a simple topic. Because with each device, you also add a chance that something can go wrong... And so far I had no need for a NAS. We do not have lots of shared content and for backup, I depend on Dropbox.

[@Vedaras911]

I also switched to lenovo mini computers. I bought 3 pcs, changed all ram to 16 GB each, SSD 240 Kigston, I7 4785T 35 W . I made a proxmox cluster of 3 nodes. Now all vms, containers spin on it. All take 50 W per hour in default mode. Its takes about 40 Kw in month x 0,17 eur.=7 -8 eur. Very satisfied. The current prices and availability of raspbbery pi is absurd.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Your electricity cost is very low compared to here ;-) Nice setup, BTW.

[@jmr]

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

[@AndreasSpiess]

Same here. But I cancelled the order for new ones.

[@maxdido6226]

This a really great idea Andreas! At the end of the day, Raspberry Pi was designed for a very different purpose (education) and using it as a “simple” smart home hub is not the right (and meanwhile cheapest) application

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. Still, many of us used it as "servers"

[@polycrystallinecandy]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Laptops are also a good idea, I agree.

[@MyAeroMove]

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

[@AndreasSpiess]

I did not know. I have to investigate! Thanks.

[@cowasakiElectronics]

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

[@fernapiedade]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I never tried it. Maybe not for a server, but for other projects.

[@paulburden905]

I’ve been working with thin clients for several years, specifically HP t series. It’s really important that you use a write filter to limit disk usage once the system has been setup because the the disk IO counts before failure are limited. You can make exceptions to critical storage areas. At the same time employing write filter will allow these things to have really long lifespans as there is limited wear on the components.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Good tip. Thanks!

[@ristomatti]

Could you elaborate what "write filter" is in this context? I googled it up and pretty much all results seemed to be about a Windows 10 feature "Unified Write Filter".

[@paulburden905]

@@ristomatti I used the HP Write Manager, which I believe is a free utility and allowed me to setup exclusion directories and “commit” changes to disk. It does look like the windows 10 service you mention might achieve the same thing. If you try it and it works for you let me know :)

[@shadow.banned]

I feel like there's a video like this every other day.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So no need to watch this one, probably.

[@HATipsByLarry]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Unfortunately, the Dells are quite expensive here. But for sure a good choice.

[@clauslohmar3379]

Thank you for this contribution! I use ThinClients for a long time as Smart TV's (long before you get them in a store) and using the used ThinClients also give them a second live. PROXMOX-this is the real game changer for the 'home-cloud'-For years I run a full-stack Server, Dell I7 32GB 2TB, with PROXMOX. Several Container ( PiHole, Domotics, NotRed, Minetest, Web-Development-Enviroment and one VM running jellyfin media centre, feeding our 4 TV's!

[@AndreasSpiess]

So you are a heavy user of Proxmox. But one number impressed me more: 4 TVs ;-)

[@executer1894]

Thank You for this interesting, accurate and also very informative video with your pleasant accent.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your kind words!

[@bennyyeung2172]

By looking at the thumbnail only, I’m shocked that I just did the same thing here in thong Kong. I bought a second hand M73 i3-4160T for just US$88! This is way better than a pi board

[@AndreasSpiess]

Welcome aboard ;-)

[@phillkelley7700]

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.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your work! I am just installing the new version on a virtual machine. Maybe I will do a new install later on my main machine.

[@zvpunry1971]

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

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the information. I agree, power consumption of modern laptops have to be low. Otherwise, they would not run for 10 hours with one battery charge.

[@antowima]

Thanks for another great video. Just a note, it would be nice to see the pc screens a little longer as it's difficult to hit the pause button in time. ;-). And I can't imagine which proxmox welcome screen is meant, which can be switched off with the proxmox helpers. A brief display of the screen at this point would have been good. Overall, your videos are getting faster and harder to follow. I don't know how many times I've rewound.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your comment. I stopped creating "programming" videos because they were considered boring by too many viewers. Did you look into the video comments? There I added some commands and "programming" videos.

[@joanandkuharajasekaram6738]

@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

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your info. I will have a look at your CPU recommendation. The memory is already according to your recommendation.