this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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In my own experience, certain things should always be on their own dedicated machines.
My primary router/firewall is on bare metal for this very reason.
I do not want to worry about my home network being completely unusable by the rest of my family because I decided to tweak something on the server.
I could quite easily run OpnSense in a VM, and I do that, too. I run proxmox, and have OpnSense installed and configured to at least provide connectivity for most devices. (Long story short: I have several subnets in my home network, but my VM OpnSense setup does not, as I only had one extra interface on that equipment, so only devices on the primary network would work)
And tbh, that only exists because I did have a router die, and installed OpnSense into my proxmox server temporarily while awaiting new-to-me equipment.
I didn't see a point in removing it. So it's there, just not automatically started.
Same here. In particular I like small cheap hardware to act as appliances, and have several raspberry pi.
My example is home assistant. Deploying on its own hardware means an officially supported management layer, which makes my life easier. It is actually running containers but i don’t have to deal with that. It also needs to be always available so i use efficient “right sized” hardware and it works regardless whether im futzing with my “lab”
If you're talking about backups and updates for addons and core, that works on VMs as well.
For my use case, I’m continually fiddling with my VM config. That’s my playground, not just the services hosted there. I want home assistant to always be available so it can’t be there.
I suppose I could have a “production “ vm server that I keep stable, separately from my “dev” vm server but that would be more effort. Maybe it’s simply that I don’t have many services I want to treat as production, so the physical hardware is the cheapest and easiest option