Hello all,
i know this seems like a stupid question to ask in this community, but i am serious.
To me: i am generally comfortable around computers, tried a few simple projects (like a music streamer based on a rpi) but i have no real education on this - all i do is follow the documentation and then google for troubleshooting. I am also (kinda) privacy focused and really annoyed at all the enshittification observable everywhere so i installed revanced and about half a year ago when i bought a new laptop i set my old thinkpad up as a proxmox-server. This is running my HomeAssistant-Instance in one VM and has another VM running ubuntu for my docker containers (paperless-ngx and immich). I really like the services these provide, but to be honest i feel uncomfortable with entrusting my data to them, as i am constantly worried i will break something and corrupt the data. Also i think i underestimated the amount of updates and maintenance that accumulates.
I am also not really willing to spend too much time learning all this from the ground up, as my dayjob is 8h in front of the computer anyway, so i dont want to spend my whole evening or weekend there as well.
I guess what i am really searching for is a service which i can just trust and pay for myself OR a very userfriendly suite of selfhosted apps.
Services i need would be:
- general cloud storage
- document organization (a la paperless-ngx)
- photos
I would also like:
- some kind of shared notes
- a media suite (like plex)
I am fine with Home Assistant, as that has no real consequences should i really mess it up badly
Thank you for any suggestions on how to move on in this matter.
There is no compelling reason to run home assistant in a vm instead of in a container.
I’d get rid of the virtualization layer in your specific case and save yourself a lot of hassle, especially on smaller systems.
Doesn’t that require manual setup of the addons if you don’t run HA OS?
that was my reasoning as well: with HA OS it is as little trouble for me to maintain - at least that was my line of thinking
Yeah, just set them up in another container.
Addons are just software.
I only run mosquitto right now, but it’s not exactly hard or complicated or time consuming to set up.
Oh I know it’s just more of a pain, there’s very little overhead from a VM running Linux so it’s well worth doing that IMO.
There is little performance overhead from running a VM. However there’s a substantial administrative overhead for keeping a virtualization system running just for home assistant.
If this a hobby to you, sure, you do you. Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted. But it’s way less effort to just run everything you need in a container stack - especially if are you already running containers for other things.
I’m not sure what you mean? HA OS in a VM doesn’t have any administrative overhead.
Yeah full VMs are pretty old school, there are a lot more management options and automation available with containers. Not to mention the compute overhead.
Red Hat doesn’t even recommend businesses to use VMs anymore, and they offer a virtualization tool that runs the VMs inside a container for legacy apps. Its called Openshift Virtualization.
Exactly how I see it and did it. Thanks for mentioning this.