New hardware solution to replace Pi

The raspberry pi (pi 2!) Running my emon hub is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Thinking of moving it to a VM/docker/something.

I currently have a home assistant vm running too.

Any recommendations/pitfalls/things to watch out for?

If running just emonhub, it should be fine for evermore (as long as the OS continues to be updated.

If you mean emoncms/emonhub combo (emonSD), then it is a bit more involved. For emoncms, I use PVE LXC and the install scripts. Docker is more involved, I don’t use it and there is no supported image (there are other Docker threads). Either way, if you are using emonhub and RFM, I’d stick with the Pi for that.

Not using the RFM, everything is over wifi.

Been adding a lot of things to the system over the last 2 years, and the Pi is getting a bit slow!

I’ve never setup any sort of proper automated backup either and getting wary of it.

More or less starting with a clean slate, using VMware as a VM host on windows (needed a win 7 instance with USB passthrough for a windows mobile device!)

Plan to backup the VM to my NAS, possibly off-site/cloud

What sort of resources would it need to have?

Is it as simple as backup and restore? And point all the mqtt devices at the new server (I’ll prob just have the VM have the same IP as the old pi)

You will need to explain your setup more fully. What OEM hardware do you have and how does it communicate?

Personally I have gone with PVE on an old Laptop. LXC containers are extremely lightweight and there is a great automated backup feature in PVE.

You can easily use an Ubuntu VM as your base and use the install scripts to install.

I’m thinking just one VM for emoncms? Including the mosquitto broker, or will you have that on a separate VM?

Almost :slight_smile:

Monitoring 2 houses, Mine, and parents (next door, share the same network)

Each has an emontx with wifi (esp8266 chip), Emonevse, and a multitude of other home made devices connected over mqtt.

Yep a VM with emoncms, with mosquitto, Ah… Will that need to be installed separately? Good to know.

Main PC/VM host is on 24/7 anyway with plenty of cpu and ram to spare, How much would emoncms need?

If you currently use Mosquitto on the Pi/emoncms then that will be fine on the VM

Not much IME, but that is on an LXC not a VM.

Well, thats going to be a a project for this week I think

Thanks for all your help and advice!

One thing to watch, the settings.ini file didn’t come across for me. If you have made any changes (I use a different MQTT Broker, you need to update that.

If you have a lot of data, there will be a gap :frowning:

New Server up and running. Much more responsive on the solar apps and dashboards.

Took about 2 hrs to make the switch, the only road bump was realising that mosquito had to be explicitly told to listen to devices external to that, after that the data came flooding in!

Also I think I done something wrong in the initial setup re sudo, As I had to do the import manually as it needed the sudo permissions to do it.

My backup file was just under 500mb compressed. It took the pi 2 about 30 mins to compress it!

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