Install Home Assistant OS in VMware ESXi | Don't Miss These CRITICAL STEPS!

Download the latest .VMDK image file: github.com/hom...
Support me on Patreon! / omgthecloud
I put a lot of time in to these videos, and your support is appreciated to ensure I keep making high-quality content that’s helpful and educational to you!
Installing HomeAssistantOS, HASSOS, HASSOS.io Virtualized in VMware vSphere ESXi is the best way to install home assistant, but there's a couple tricks to get the home assistant OVA .vmdk virtual hard disk to play nice, and work properly! I've got you covered, let's step through it together, so your home automation server is off to a good start, and ready to start consuming data from your IoT devices! homeassistant vm, homeassistant vmware, homeassistant esxi

[@BigBangGamers]

Thanks you for this. I was able to easily apply your tutorial to Esxi 6.7, which mine looked a little different, but was basically the same thing after minimal looking around. Very helpful video! Plus saved my from purchasing new hardware. Thank you very much!

[@pilotwasif]

Wonderful tutorial mate, this to the point and precise video make the work more fun and easier, I have installed it successfully on my ESXi for testing purposes. Big thank you.

[@SayujShrestha]

Great Video !! To the point and easier to follow.

[@OMGTheCloud]

Glad it was helpful!

[@thestefsterbun1820]

Thanks! Running on bear-metal after spending some time trying to get this working on the rabbit hole that is Workstation running on Windows 10 running on ESXi which didn't end up working. Nice job!

[@mitchellfrance3441]

After I wasted hours attempting to install HA on ESXi, failed. After watching your video I am up and running in my new HA instance. Thank you is merely enough for the amount of head pounding you saved me from lol.

[@JamesG19771]

Brilliant video, saved me a lot of time reading forums. Thank you!

[@OMGTheCloud]

Glad this helped you! Next episode in this series (Friday) we’ll be doing some basic configuration, getting ESPHome addon installed, so we can start pulling in those IoT devices!

[@MukulTripathi]

@@OMGTheCloud Let me search your videos to find that out :)

[@Duffley]

Confirmed this works with ESXi 7 and haos_ova-9.5.vmdk The missing piece of my puzzle was removing the hard disk/cdrom upon creation and setting the new disk to IDE0.

[@EmperorTerran]

good straight to my issue

[@Lab247]

Thank you for this helpful video !

[@gabe998]

Cracking walkthrough! Thank you!

[@nickrusso86]

Nice video and saved me time. My only suggestion is that sometimes you moved from screen to screen too quickly making it even difficult to pause at the right moment. Leave the screens up for a few seconds while you're configuring. Thank you for this wonderful video.

[@OMGTheCloud]

Thanks for the feedback, this is very helpful! One of my earlier videos, but I’m always learning and welcome feedback 👍

[@thoreivindbrantzeg6438]

Nice video, tho it doesnt work on ESXi 8.x. using v10.x

[@HomeTech_Pro]

Great explanation , Thank you !

[@Austiin12]

Great tutorial man!

[@OMGTheCloud]

I appreciate it! Stay tuned, this Friday we're doing some deep-dive config on Home Assistant and the ESPHome addon!

[@MukulTripathi]

This was pretty cool. I'd love to see the esp home plugin and mqtt working, in your tutorial. You had a really concise way of explaining it. One question tho: don't we need a CD ROM drive to update VMware tools in future?

[@OMGTheCloud]

Thank you friend, I'm glad this was helpful! ESPHome video for flashing via USB just dropped Friday, check it out, and the next video coming out in that series is deep-dive in to MQTT deep sleep with ESP32. Regarding virtual CDROM for VMware tools: This should not be necessary, as Linux based OSes like this use 'open-vm-tools' or similar, which are just downloaded, not installed from the hypervisor. Hope this helps and thank you for watching!

[@Smitty3572]

What's the best way to expand the available space on this image?

[@jimberry7865]

PERFECT!

[@ruffinruffin989]

Thanks for this video. Can this vm have 2 nics to traverse subnets?

[@OMGTheCloud]

Sure! Those additional NICs would show up in the networks in Supervisor 👍

[@williambravin1254]

Hello I'm not an IT guy and extreemly new to VM. It's (VM 6.7) installed on an ML350 G6.I created the HA in a plane and simple setup. I downloaded the home assistant os vmdk I followed the steps as outlined. I deleted the cd drive and rebooted the server. I did load the file into the datastore I did select IDE0 (next to it appeard Master) and changed the bios to efi. I got the Failed - Failed to lock the file error what did i miss? thank you

[@southseapirate1]

Sounds like you did it right imho. I just did this on 6.7 as well with same settings. Maybe delete the VM and start over and follow each step in order. I say this as I see you said you "rebooted" the server. I did all the steps before booting. Changing BIOS to EFI after the fact may be your issue.

[@williambravin1254]

@@southseapirate1 Thank you for your reply I got it runnng however it would not work in EFI mode on ther hp ML350 G6 (very Old) i had to revert back to bios mode. HA is now loaded and running (now just mneed to be configured

[@Stor1c]

Excellent video! Thanks! Installing HA went like a charm! :) Quick question, since I'm a noob on ESXi.. Why do you have the CPU's on 1 socket. Will it run better that way? Maybe a stupid question, but why not give the VM max CPU's and on individual sockets?

[@OMGTheCloud]

Glad you got it up and running, and.. that's a great question! In virtualization, there's a concept of NUMA nodes. Simplest way to think of this is, if your server has multiple physical CPUs (not just cores on one CPU, but 2 or 4 physical CPU sockets), each CPU, and its' corresponding RAM and cache, is a NUMA node. For performance reasons, you want to avoid spanning NUMA nodes. So If I know my ESXi server has two physical CPU sockets, and each CPU has 8 cores, I'd want to make sure I keep that VM running on one NUMA node, but assigning it 8 or less cores, on 1 socket. Next, is the question about number of CPUs to assign, and this comes in to the topic of CPU scheduling. In virtualization, generally you do not just throw more resources 'at the problem'. Giving a VM more CPU cores increases its' demand on the CPU scheduler, and can actually make it run slower, because its' workload demand on the hypervisor is so big, so wide, that it has trouble getting its' place in line, when competing with other VMs on the same host. So, just arbitrarily giving a VM the max number of CPU cores ESXi will allow you to give it is certainly going to cause trouble. For something like HomeAssistant, 2 cores is plenty. For something more demanding, you might give it 4 cores. For something really demanding, like a SQL or other database server, you might give it 8 cores. I hope this helps! As I'm writing this, I feel like this is almost certainly a topic for at least a couple upcoming videos!

[@Stor1c]

@@OMGTheCloud Thanks a lot for your good explanation. Followed your guide and set up the VM as you did. But also have a VM running windows and when I configured it, years ago, I choose 8 CPU's and 1 Core per Socket, but since I only have 1 physical CPU I guess that was not the best idea. :) Will try to adjust it now. Really liked your explanation on this subject, so any video on ESXi setup I will definitely watch! :)

[@malakies999]

Thanks for the tute. Total noob. Even tho the virtual hardware setup wasnt the same, I was able to install this on a "HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10". VM started up and and UI started. Now I would like to to install a "bridge", I have the "zigbee 3.0 usb dongle plus", how on earth would I get this to be seen on the server? Any guidance much appreciated...

[@OMGTheCloud]

Are you running Home Assistant as a Virtual Machine on your server, or directly on bare-metal? If running as a VM, which hypervisor are you using? VMware ESXi? You need to use USB pass-through to present the Zigbee USB dongle to the VM. From there, you'll need to go in to the Home Assistant settings... hardware.. and identify the USB device, so the Zigbee Add-On can talk to it. Hope this helps!!

[@malakies999]

@@OMGTheCloud Sorry for the delay, i happen to come back to this! I have a HP server, and had installed ESXI 6u3 from a USB drive. I was able to add the zigbee dongle and control a few smart lights. Now looking at trying to introduce sensors. Cant seem to add "bluetooth" which apparently is supported, but theres some config around d-bus & bluez but trying to work thru it.. fun times :D Thank you

[@alphenit]

love this video!! I installed it and things went perfect thanks to your instruction! Running it on a vsphere 6.7 host, what I did notice was, that I'm unable to create a snapshot of the VM when I have a USB zwave stick connected to the VM. (snapshot can be taken when the VM is OFF but not when it's turned on) is that something you've also experienced?

[@OMGTheCloud]

Hey there, glad this video was helpful! Yes, I’ve also seen odd snapshot behavior when USB devices are passed through to the VM. I think this has something to do with how VMware interacts with that attached device, and is not able to cleanly suspend its’ I/O. However, backups with Veeam Backup & Recovery work fine with the VM running, which is effectively an API call to perform a snapshot. Hope this helps!

[@alphenit]

@@OMGTheCloud Thanks for the quick response! I tried it with Veeam and had the same results so at least it is a consistent problem (error: unable to access file since it is locked) Specific error in the veeam log: Failed to create VM snapshot. Error: CreateSnapshot failed, vmRef vm-51918, timeout 1800000, snName VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT, snDescription Please do not delete this snapshot. It is being used by Veeam Backup., memory False, quiesce False (maybe it's a setting in the veeam backup job but no clues so far) So I'll have to count on HA's own backup for now.

[@saltybenefits]

"Don't Miss These CRITICAL STEPS!" Skips the half of the installation..

[@vavsaftoiu]

not true. he was perfectly right.