Andreas has built his Home Automation Server on Raspberry Pi 4.

As I have two HP MicroServer Gen8 running HPE Customized ESXi 6.5.0 U3 (my test lab) I've decided to create "normal" linux virtual machine.

• download "debian-10.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso" from Debian site.
• create VM with 1vCPU, 2GB vRAM and 32GB of disk
• install Debian in minimal configuration
• ssh into and:
  • install Open VM tools: apt-get install open-vm-tools
  • Install Docker using following how-to: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-and-use-docker-on-debian-10/
  • install Portainer (docker management package) using following command:

    • docker volume create portainer_data

    • docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce

Now, the platform is ready to install needed apps.

Essential apps for home automation are Mosquitto and Node-RED.

If you want to use sensors (like temperature, humidity, illuminance, etc...) you will need also InfluxDB to store the readings and Grafana to visualise them.

There are more interesting applications that can be installed on this system. Keep in mind, that you have to adjust the assigned computing power and diskspace to the needs.