Blair Young

It has gone rather quiet. I thought I would see more general discussion or the odd update. Unless I've missed something the most recent update has been a revision to the blog introducing hex OS local originally published 25th Nov 2025 and updated 23rd Jan earlier this year. I'm not complaining before anyone jumps on me. I've been happily running the beta since originally hearing about it on LTT and couldn't have built my NAS without it (not with my skillset at the time anyway). So far it's been running flawlessly, shares and apps have been a breeze to set up, and the minor jobs I've had to do myself such as setting up a VM in truenas for Homeassistant have been recognised and appear on the Hex OS dashboard. I know it's possible I might have to start again from scratch but fingers crossed there is an update path that doesn't break everything. I have on occasion had to re-adopt the server on the dashboard (probably my fault) but it's only happened a couple of times. To avoid wiping everything I just popped out my drives, re-adopted, shut down, popped the drives back in and everything came back when I restarted. If there isn't a simple update to 1.0 with any luck a similar workaround will prevent data loss.

I'm very much hoping so as it's currently running docker, home assistant and frigate for me. All of which I can reinstall with backups to be fair which is why I've held off transferring all my files.

But is that how it could potentially work? Outside of following a step by step tutorial setting up Home Assistant, and later fumbling my way through Linux to get Frigate running I'm a newbie. Does Hex OS have the potential to be my one stop shop for everything running on one machine? I guess that question is hardware dependant but I'm hoping I should be ok with my current machine: i7 7700k 32GB RAM M.2 256GB Boot Disk 8x 8TB Exos SAS drives And arriving soon: 9300-8I LSI SAS HBA (I saw a deal from a reputable seller for $30/drive, didnt see that they were SAS drives, and promptly had to learn about HBA's 😅) For Configuration: From what I've read either 2no. vdev, each with 4no. drives in raidz2 with 2no. parity drives. or 1no. vdev with 8no. drives in raidz2 with 2no. parity drives. Again - I need to do a lot more reading this is all new to me.

Honestly I'm surprised to see so few replies. I would have thought a lot more people would be asking for HA integration. Hex OS popped up on my radar because of the LTT video. Until then it was a bridge too far to play with. But with some hand holding and user friendly features I'm jumping in. That being said, as a total newbie currently running Home assistant using virtual box on my daily driver windows 10 machine, I was hoping Hex OS could be used as a hypervisor, run windows 10/11 for daily use, with home assistant and Frigate running in separate containers. Previously I had to have a separate SFF Ubuntu machine running frigate which was always clunky and unreliable. Is this realistic or am I misunderstanding how this could work?