I love Home Assistant and have been using it for years. It just keeps getting better and better over time! With so many new features added all the time I have just started blowing away my entire VM of it and recreating from scratch to see what’s new. It’s a good problem to have!

Blue Iris in the other hand… just give me a damn version that runs on Linux natively and not some Wine bullshit.

I would stick with the 7020’s or get something smaller like a Beelink unit that seems to be all over tech YouTube right now.

The r210 is loud due to it being a 1U server. The upgrade path on the r210ii is very limited. Look up the Dell Technical Guide for the r210ii to get a list of what you can upgrade them to as far as CPU and RAM requirements. It only takes up to 32gb of ECC UDIMM which I always found more expensive than ECC RDIMM. For CPU, the best CPU it can take is only a 4 core, with no hyperthreading.

Experience: I have run two r210ii’s before moving to three r230’s before finally going big to a r730xd. In the past month, I have migrated away from the r730xd to a Dell 5820T and 3x Dell 3070 SFF PC’s to combat the noise and heat generation in my home office.