Before combining everything onto a few Proxmox-powered cluster nodes, I ran dedicated hardware for specific packages, be it Home a**istant and Frigate. The former was running on a compact mini PC, and by compact, I mean ridiculously small. It had an Intel chip, barely any RAM, and almost no storage, making it perfect for running the smart home … or so I thought. Though I enjoyed having no layers, no extra software, and no hypervisor at the time, I eventually outgrew the system it ran on. Bare metal can prove useful for many deployments, and it’s never really the wrong choice to make for Home a**istant.