I confirm no need to have a separate machine for the controller (although
if you do want to do down this route, a Raspberry Pi works well and, when
I last checked, was a bit cheaper than their branded controller).
I can highly recommend these Unifi non-official (but well maintained) Docker
images (I run mine on my main PC which isn't on continuously):
These are very easy to update and give you some of the benefits of running
on dedicated hardware (segregated dependencies) without the hardware
expense and without the admin overhead of maintaining a traditional VM.
It's especially important to keep the controller up to date (and I also avoid their
cloud service) as they haven't had an immaculate security record (including, in the
opinion of some) downplaying of major issues / lack of openness.
You don't have to be running the controller 24/7 and can choose to only fire
it up when you want to push configuration changes to the APs.
You will only have monitoring when the controller is up though.
Regarding kit, I plug my Unifi APs into a PoE switch and route using one of
But anything that can run OpenWRT is good. Unless you like BSD. But we
are on a *Linux* users group here...
