I’ve been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I’ll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?
Additional notes:
- I’m already using Tailscale (it’s what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
- I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
- I’m planning on using Proxmox
Thanks in advance for the advice! :)
You must log in or # to comment.
With Proxmox it’s quite easy, you can copy the VM/LXC Backups to the new host (via SCP, NFS or whatever) and restore there. Recently did exactly that.
Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!
You could even just create a cluster and do a migration. I don’t think you need zfs for that, you only need zfs for replication.
Should work indeed, but they’d need replicated space. I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky?
I edited, since it was ambiguous. I think you only need zfs if you want replication, cold migrations should be fine without it.
Removing nodes from clusters is fine. It’s not really encouraged, but if a node fails you have to be able to remove it, so it’s possible.
I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky
Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn’t know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I’m not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.
You don’t need multiple devices and quorum unless you’re using HA. I have two nodes just so I can migrate back and forth when doing updates instead of shutting all the VMs down. No quorum, no HA.
Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.
In Home Assistant, navigate to Settings > System > Backups. Configure the backup settings and create a manual backup.
On your new Proxmox server, you can download the qcow2 file from Home Assistant’s website and run it as a virtual machine.
On first boot, you can import your previous configuration from a backup.
When you upgrade your desktop PC, plan for it to be the home server after that.
I got a rackmount case to transplant my old desktop montherboard into every 5 years. I also got a 4-port NIC so it can also be a router. My server is a 4th gen Core i5 and it’s still plenty of power for a home server.
If you’re a laptop guy, I’m not sure what you’d do. Maybe ask friends for their old desktops. The Win10 discontinuation next month would be a great opportunity to snap up some business PCs destined for landfill.
For Home Assistant, I think you either need Docker or a dedicated box. I kinda hate how there isn’t a .deb package for it like literally every other service on my server.
All my backups are tested, so upgrades (or recovering from a failure) are usually straightforward. The only thing I don’t back up is my collection of Linux ISOs, but that I can easily reacquire.
If you can, I’d skip the laptop and go for a used workstation SFF now. $250 or so would buy you plenty of server.
That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.
