Hi All
The idea is good adding Home Assistant to NS8.
After using different systems for Home Automation / Control for the past 7 years now I can pass some advice and caution on this subject.
Home Assistant is my premium choice for Home Automation, it has been around for a few years now, and is moving forwards at even higher speeds than NS8!
It works rock solid and, depending on design used / created, has a very good WAF (Wife Acceptancy Factor)!
But: It must work 100% of time, no delays.
This already excludes using a VM / Hypervisor, unless you have very high power and fast SSD or NVME storage. Backups, Maintenence, Restores of other VMs will induce delays and other non WAF compatible effects.
→ Walking in the evening into a dark room, and the lights turn on 3 minutes later is a No-Go !!!
Actually, my experience showed, that any such system must be independant hardware and software - from anything else. At the moment I use either a Raspberry PI4 or, newer, an Odroid ARM based box, this has proven good for Home / SoHo use, even for larger environments with 4 or 8 GB RAM. Low Power usage, high availability, low heat production (Odroid better than RPI4!), all positive factors.
Do NOT underestimates the effects of delays, and similiar effects on the usability of Home Automation!
This can make or break your project!
For me, I plan on using this (if and when available) as a test / dev system.
My 2 cents
Andy