An important thing when using Home Assistant is to select what hardware it should run on. A lot of people is running it on a Raspberry Pi, while others had chosen other alternative as a laptop, a mini computer, like an Intel NUC, or on their own server as a virtual machine.
I used some time on reading about the pros and cons on the different hardware platforms, and I chose to use my Intel NUC that I didn’t use for anything. I installed VMware ESXi on it and installed Home Assistant as a virtual machine. It have a way better CPU than a Raspberry Pi, and it was with 16GB of RAM and a fast M2 SSD, so disk space wouldn’t be a problem. This choice is also based on the amount of units, that I want to integrate with Home Assistant, for example I read that if you have more than 100 units integrated to Home Assistant, no one would recommend the Raspberry Pi based on performance.
I also quite quickly chose that I wanted to have Hass.io in the installation too, because it adds an add-on store from where you can install different plugins to the system.
I used some time browsing the net to find a way to install HassOS (now called Home Assistant Core) as a virtual machine on VMware. I found a good guide from a Mark Depalma, that have done the same and described the method, because it wasn’t straight forward.
After around 15 minutes I had the virtual machine up and running HassOS, and I could start playing around with Home Assistant.