I’ve spent parts of the last 9 months playing with Home Assistant and have written about some of my adventures. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to go all in with Home Assistant and ditch my Vera. I bought an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle and starting moving all my devices over to it. Within a few days, I had all my devices moved over and unplugged my Vera. Everything was running great on my Raspberry Pi B, but I noticed that the History and Logbook features were slow. I like looking at the history to look at temperature fluctuations in the house.
I had read that switching from the SQLite database to a MySQL database would speed things up. So I installed MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) on my Raspberry Pi and saw a slight increase in speed, but not much. Next was to move MariaDB to a separate server using Docker. Again, a slight increase in speed, but it still lagged. At this point everything I read pointed to running Home Assistant on an Intel NUC or another computer. I didn’t want to invest that kind of money in this, so I took a look at what I had and started down the path of installing Ubuntu on my old Mac mini which was completely overkill for it (Intel Quad Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD). Then I remembered that I had read about a virtual machine image for Hass.io and decided to give that a try.
After some experimenting, I managed to get Home Assistant installed on a virtual machine running in VMWare on my Mac Pro. (A few days after I did this, I saw that someone posted an article documenting this.) I gave the VM 8 GB of RAM, 2 cores (the Mac Pro has 12) and 50 GB of storage. Wow, the speed improvement was significant and history now shows up almost instantly (the database is running in a separate VM)! I was so pleased with this, I decided to unplug the Raspberry Pi and make the virtual machine my home automation hub. There were a few tricks, however. The virtual machine’s main disk had to be setup as a SATA drive (the default SCSI wouldn’t boot), suspending the VM confused it, and the Z-Wave stick wouldn’t reconnect upon restart. After much digging, I found the changes I needed to make to the .vmx file in the virtual machine:
suspend.disabled = "TRUE"
usb.autoConnect.device0 = "name:Sigma\ Designs\ Modem"
(The USB auto connect is documented deep down on VMWare’s site.)
I’ve rebooted the Mac Pro a few times and everything comes up without a problem very quickly, so I’m now good to go with this setup. Z-Wave takes about 2.5 minutes to finish startup vs. 5 or 6 on the Pi. A friend asked if I was OK with running a “mission critical” component on a VM. I said that I was because the Mac Pro has been rock solid for a long time and my virtual machines have been performing well. I could change my mind later on, but I see no reason to spin up another machine when I have a perfectly overpowered machine that is idle 95% of the time.
What next? Now that I have more power for my automation, I may look at more pretty graphs and statistics. I may also just cool it for awhile as I’ve poured a lot of time into this lately to get things working to my satisfaction. This has definitely been an adventure and am glad that I embarked on it.
Are you finding much of a speed difference with the the firing of events? eg. A light turning on once motion is detected.
Currently I’ve got a vera plus doing all the z-wave but controlling everything with Hass.io and Node-Red. Events can sometimes be almost instant up to 4-5 seconds before deciding to do their thing.
Hi!
I’m finding my setup with the Z-Wave stick to be quite fast. I don’t usually notice a delay with the Z-Wave stuff, but I don’t use any Z-Wave sensors; I use Envisalink on an alarm system for all the sensors.