I just finished migrating my Home Assistant installation from a Raspberry pi to an Intel NUC and I thought I’d share my experience. All in all, it went well but there were a couple of pain points I’d like to have known in advance.
Here’s what I did. First, I prepared the NUC for installation. Rather than going bare metal, I installed proxmox because I plan on running other stuff on it as well. Proxmox installation was very straightforward, but figuring out how to install HA on it wasn’t, as I’ve never used proxmox before.
I first tried to use the HA image as a virtual installation medium, which did not work. I realized that, like with the RPi, it’s not an installer but a ready to use disk image. I found a nice guide on how to install HA on proxmox with a handy helper script to set everything up for you.
Now I had a new HA instance running, ready for initial setup. Time for the switchover:
This is where HA still has a pain point. There is no progress bar or anything to let you know the state of the restoration process. It took quite a while until the web UI came back up (and I’m not sure which log file I should have been monitoring in the console) and once it finally did, the add-ons were stuck in a weird state where some of them appeared to be running but were still shown as stopped. HA core was operational already, including all Wifi based integrations. Zigbee2mqtt wasn’t up yet because I hadn’t yet passed through the zigbee stick.
After I had grown tired of waiting, I rebooted the VM and now the add-ons started up properly. All the settings were migrated, including Mosquitto’s state. Very nice!
The last things to fix were:
All in all, a fairly smooth migration, with the only bump on the road being the lack of progress reporting when restoring from backup. Would recommend. The NUC (A NUC11 with a Celeron N4505 processor) plus memory and NVME drive was only about twice as expensive as a RPi4 with an SD card but is a lot more powerful with a similar idle power consumption of around 6W.
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io