I was looking for a replacement for my raspberry pi and remembered I have an unused MacBook Pro i5 8gb 2013. Somethings like home assistant require a Linux VM. I remember when I ran windows with a Linux vm it used a lot of resources. Is Mac the same?
You can use Parallels or Virtual Box to spin up a VM. Performance should be decent on any recent vintage Mac.
Also tagging @rakeshg, because I think he has experience with either Parallels or VB (or maybe both).
Thank you
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@frmWink2Hubitat - I use Parallels on a 2011 MacBook Pro (Retina) with no issues. Since getting a new MacBook Pro with the M1 chip, the old one still has Parallels (but used infrequently). It now hosts 2 instances of Node-RED, 1 instance of MySQL database, 1 instance of Homebridge, Plex server and a bunch of other apps… chugs along just fine 
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Thank you. May I ask why you use it for homrbridge and Plex and not macOS apps?
Do I run a new VMware for every program or one big VM? Should I run docker in it?
I use a 2011 vintage Mac Mini... I've got a lot of them apparently 
4 in this room alone. Over time the new ones come in and displace the older... one of those older is now used as a Media Center. But Home Automation has piled on a fistful of NodeJS accessories. In addition, I've spun up 8-9 instances of Home Assistant over the years. I haven't come to use any of them, but that I blame on Home Assistant, not the tools for running it.
I use VirtualBox for this purpose. The new Apple Silicon Mac Mini is calling my name, but I must have a full featured VM choice and it may be that Parallels gets there first.
To more directly answer: Yes, the 2013 MB Pro when running any of the Virtualizing products, will run Home Assistant just fine. However, be aware of your memory. 8gb is OK for Mac OS + Parallels and for one VM... be it Linux, Windows or Home Assistant. But I would shy away from running two at the same time. This Mac Mini I'm typing on has 32gb and I routinely run two Windows VMs and something else... like Home Assistant. I ran the most recent instance for a couple months and it never failed in any way. I had only added 4 ZWave devices so it wasn't a strain, but I'd go a week or more of having it running 24x7 but doing nothing. Then I'd be reminded that it's running and grab the Door Sensor. In response, the RGBW Light would light and Appliance wall wart would Click to tell me all was well. Perfect really.. if only adding those things wasn't so damn hard.
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Correction - it's a late 2012 Model MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD.
It has all the standard Mac apps installed and it was my primary laptop until late last year (when it was replaced by the new M1 MacBook Pro). I run test instances of NR and Homebridge on that since my "live" instances are on a Raspberry Pi. MySQL instance has 2 databases - one test and one production (connected to Node-RED on the Raspberry Pi).
I still use it as my iTunes and Plex server, as well as for my primary Photos library.
EDIT: For storage, I have a WD Cloud 4TB NAS and a 2TB external SSD for my Photos library.
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Absolutely agree with this! More than one concurrent VM would kill my MacBook Pro...
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I would not run multiple VMs on 8GB Mac. I'm not sure about Docker as I don't use that
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Thank you, maybe I’ll keep my h.a on my pi 4. I really want to use the Mac to save iOS stuff, like instead of I cloud and as a media server (direct play)sonarr,radarr,NZB get and Plex. Would you recommend a Linux VM or just use the Mac OS apps?
Btw? Would you want to trade a mint mbp for a Mac mini?
I use the native MacOS app for Plex. Unless a native OS app is not available or is lacking features available on other platforms, I generally don't spin up a VM.
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the only "spare" one I have is worse 
It's a 2014 version with 4gb and NO option to upgrade. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought it
I have no trouble running 3 VMs on this:
I need a replacement for CentOS (as does everyone else) and with each contender that hits the news, I download and fire up a new VM for it to see if I like it enough or not.. Linux VM can run in 1 gig allocation and my two Windows VMs are 6gig and 4 gig. I'm still less than half of the 32gig. So this is the machine that would get most of my votes
My Media Server + NodeJS (Homebridge, Node-Red, HubConnect Proxy, etc.) all run directly on this:
I thought the 2014 one would replace it but I goofed on memory. 
I've run a VM for Home Assistant on that too, but it's not running anymore.. got bored with it.
What apps are you “media servers”
iTunes.
I had a Roku and used Plex for it.. serving up the same media, but again, I rotated the Roku out, replaced by the Apple TV that got replaced by a newer Apple TV. I had a third product running at the same time to deliver the media to the 1st gen iPad. That's so far gone, I shouldn't mention it.. except to say the Mac Mini was running all that and more once upon a time. It's much reduced now due to technology convergence.
So I’m guessing you use a home sharing server
