I started off using a Raspberry Pi, but since getting a VMWare box I moved everything over. This way I’m plugged into the UPS and don’t have to worry about the SD Card. I’m still using Ubuntu Server because it’s good to gain some basic knowledge and saves using a Windows Licence (which probably also has a higher overhead for memory and CPU)
Also started with a RPi (only for home automation, so OH, Mosquitto, Nodered; other services ran on an other machine).
I had a few issues with that : the RPi being an ARM machine, and the “default” linux install being Raspbian, quite a few software projects required external repositories/scripts to have a recent version of that project. That’s fine for a quick and dirty install, but horrible for long-term maintenance. I did not have performance issues though.
Also, SD card corruption… (in the worst case, only after a year.)
I’ve now migrated everything to one Ubuntu Server machine, every service in docker (using docker-compose).
I’m using Windows Home Server 2011 on a physical box, but there are some things that don’t work quite as well on Windows as I have read they will on Linux (mainly the funky stuff to do presence detection, and updating openhab itself) - so might be looking at making some changes - but it’ll have to be PC-based, I couldn’t handle the performance hit of using something like a RPi!
A lot of your options are not mutually exclusive. For example, I run OH in a VM and Docker on that VM.
I run on a VMWare VM running on an ESXi server and run OH (and all the related services like Mosquitto, InfluxDB, Grafana) in Docker containers. I build, maintain, update, and manage this (and the rest of my machines) using Ansible.
I’m not sure how that solves the
quite a few software projects required external repositories/scripts to have a recent version of that project.
That is just as true on Ubuntu as it is on Raspbian. And you can run Ubuntu Server on the RPi if that was the only reason for dropping it. Clearly, that isn’t your only reason (the SD card issue is a real one) but I don’t see how using Ubuntu Server solves needing to use external repositories for the latest version of some packages. I run OH (and everything else) on Ubuntu Server 17.10 and I still have to use some external repositories and scripts to get the latest versions of some software packages.
Every service is in docker; the only external repository on my Ubuntu Server is the one for Docker. Generally, docker-hub has sufficiently up-to-date images for all the software I want. Docker hub also contains way less images for ARM.
(Granted, if I do images myself, I still have to update them manually.)
It is not really possible to install Docker-compose on the RPi (no repos are for ARM processor visibly) without jumping through a lot of hoops.
I used Blackberry Black with Ubuntu before, now I’m running it on Synology NAS backed by UPS. Now it’s way better and much more stable. The first not so planned downtime was when I had to replace the batteries of my UPS recently…
