Hi
I have moved frome Homeseer to Home assistant and i am so glad for that !
But i have a problem.
My installation is in a VMware machine and also was my Homeseer.
Homeseer was installed on a Windows 10 machine and also Deconz for my Zigbee.
All communication to Zigbee and Z-wave adapter go to a Silex DS 510 USB device server through network.
This was the easiest way to connect the adapters.
I tried a passthrough configuration to the USB ports but got problems with this.
Then i moved to Home assistant i continue using Deconz on the Windows 10 machine and this works very well but i want to stop doing that.
And to use Z-wave i hade to continue using Homeseer because i can not connect the Z-wave adapter to Home assistant.
So my question is now.
How can i connect the USB dongles to Home assistant that is inside a WMware machine without using passthrough ?
Is there a way to connect the Silex DS 510 USB device server to Home assistant ?
Some other way to do this ?
I recently moved my HA from a rPi to a VMWare workstation on my Mac and didn’t have any problems mapping my various USB devices like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Insteon and Bluetooth.
Thanks for the answer.
But i am not sure this will work for me.
I should have mentioned that it’s a VMware ESXI server i use.
But i will take a look at it.
Sure, you can add USB devices to HA VM in ESXi Server. I use this configuration for few years by now, initially with ESXi 6U2, since few months with ESXi 8. Hre is configuration of my VM:
As you can see I have 2 USB devices, Conbee II and Aeotec Zwave Gen 5 sticks connected to HA. Working flawlesly. It is done on VM configuration level, as ESXi server does see devices conected to hosts USB controller. It is not passthrough, as required for PCI devices.
Regarding your setup, as I understand you run Deconz on separate machine, so you can migrate to Deconz add-on (as I have it configured) and reconnect stilc to Deconz running inside HA VM. I have no experience with Silex stick, but I’d assume that it could be connected exactly same way. Just make sure, that inside your HA VM you also configured USB controller (you can see on screenshot, but I think it is added by default to HA OVA file already).
Luckily with USB devices you do not need to passthrough entire controller, it is handled by host. Then only specific devices are connected to virtual USB controller on VM.
And one more hint, as this might be tricky to identify devices in VA VM, as these might have strange names on OS level…
So for Deconz it looks following (on my system). In Hardware configuration of HA:
For Zwave… frankly speaking I do not recall how it was configured, I believe HA discovered the stick on its own and guided through configuration steps…
Hi
I found the problem.
I had only configured USB Controller in VM machine.
I did not know i had to add a device also.
Now i have a working Z-wave in HA
Thank you for the help.
Now i am wondering what will happen i move my Conbee from Deconz inside Windows 10 to the Deconz inside HA.
Will all my device continue working or do i need to reconfigure all devices.
Do you know ?
I believe you can create backup directly from phoscon (from Gateway view) on Windows and same way restore configuration to HA addon. Did not tried this personaly, but never heard that it is not working…
Just signed up to say thank you for the pics on the ESXI usb setup… i was trying to use passthrough which was not working… Need to break my habbits - Im used to using that method for passing GPU over to VM.
He means that only adding the USB controller will not make it work, you will also need to add the USB device to the VM. If you do not have the USB controller already added it will auto-add if you add an USB device to the VM.
