Home Automation Server

I strongly suggest that you use a dedicated Home Automation Server. While you could use the home server to host the automation server as well, i prefer to have two discrete systems so that general services will not affect home automation and vice-versa.

Considering that home automation is something critical, which might be controlling your heating / cooling, your blinds and maybe also your intrusion detection, motion cameras and alarm system, i believe that is much better to have it independently located on it's own hardware.

From a software point of view, i choose and love Home Assistant, so i cnanot but recoment to purchase a Green to support it's development. Short of a dedicated purchase, you can also repurpose some older hardware.