You can install it on a computer and run it as a physical computer. How many do you know about the virtual machines? The virtual machine (VM) is said to be the emulation of a computer system. Of course, that means whenever you reboot windows, or windows decides to reboot the machine for you, your HA goes offline too.VirtualBox or VMware, Which One Is Better? why would you need to wipe the machine? You can just run virtualbox as an app on windows and presumably the same is true for vmware. Although I do have a virtualbox VM 'standby' on my desktop that can take over in a few minutes if need be.īut nothing prevents you from starting with a VM on your windows machine, and you can trivially migrate to a dedicated machine, Pi or otherwise, later. I even often regret moving from a pi to a 'server' that does a lot of other stuff, and may switch back to a pi just so the proverbial lights dont go out if I decide to do some work on the server. Like 3% cpu usage and I have a pretty complicated and comprehensive setup.īut im going to echo what u/TheByteStuff said you will want a dedicated machine for this eventually.

HA worked fine on my Pi3, it now runs on a proxmox x86 server where it gets just a single core running at ~1 GHz and bores it to death. I have run HyperVM for some 'sandbox' VMs under a dedicated Windows 10 machine and it holds up ok, starts up the VMs on reboot if configured to do so, etc.Ĭurious to see what recommendations/views folks have on this. It's built in to Windows and HA offers an image for it too. If you do pursue the idea, I'll suggest you also consider HyperV as well. I don't believe it natively offers functions to autostart VMs on boot so you'd need to play with things like Schedule to autostart. I've not tried to use it as a vm server farm. I've not used VMware Workstation, just under esxi which is a different animal. If you are using this machine for gaming or other intense uses, then having it also act as server especially for video recording may not be the best choice either. Hence, I am not a fan of the idea of using a Windows desktop OS as a server. I'm a Windows user as far as development environment however, the more and more Microsoft makes changes I am more and more disenchanted with sporadic reboots, etc. In general, I think you'd be better off with a dedicated environment/machine to act as a 'server' whether it is just Home Assistant or other things running on it.

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