I’m not sure where to ask help on this. Ive been running HA on a windows mini-pc within Oracle VirtualBox for a year or so and in the last few days it has been stopping overnight. I can’t see anything unusual in home-assistant.log or logbook. There are no error messages in the terminal window in virtualbox. Clicking on the virtualbox window makes it restart, boot normally and run until it next stops, a day or 2 later. I’ve had a look at the VirtualBox log files, but they are hard to understand (each line is timestamped in elapsed time not date/time). As far as I can see there are no entries immediately before last night’s stoppage, but on restarting there is a line saying “guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received xxx seconds ago” where xxx is consistent with when HA stopped.
I’m not aware of this coinciding with a version update, new integration or any significant change to my set-up (Although I do tweak it quite often, I’ve only been clearing some minor errors recently).
I’m not expecting anyone to work out from this what is happening, but maybe help me put things in place to work out what the error might be?
My set-up is:
Windows mini-pc 8Gb RAM, large hard disk running windows 11.
Oracle VirtualBox 7.0 with 4gB RAM, 3 processors & 32gB HDD assigned to HA instance (26% of HDD used according to HA).
Core2024.10.2
Supervisor2024.10.0
Operating System13.1
Frontend20241002.3
I read somewhere that to get HA stable VirtualBox chipset emulation setting has to be changed to ICH9, which I did a few weeks ago. It seemed to make HA more stable until the last few days.
I only have one tip… switch to VMWare, a bit harder to set up, but way more stable then VB…
(speaking from own experience, VB had memory/cpu issues when I tried to make it run stable for some months; switched to VMWare never had to look back ever since).
VMware workstation is free for personal use nowadays
If windows rebooted I don’t know why VB would have restarted but not the ha instance, so I suspect it’s ha. That would also be consistent with the message in the VB log.
It has reset at 3 am before, but not always - it was around 7 am yesterday.
I installed Virtualbox on Windows, but after a year of horror I took the container
and used in Virtualbox running on my Linux Debian11 Mini PC.
No problems after doing that.
Just copied the container, without changing anything in HA.
Windows is a bad choice. It might update, or sleep, or find other ways to lock down your data or fudge you up.
Look there, what is the host doing at that time.
I think you should consider Proxmox - a lot of people run HA that way, and its management interface runs in a browser so no client install. There’s even a Proxmox Helper Script to install HA.
Proxmox sounds interesting. As I understand it I’d have to wipe the pc, install proxmox and then run HA and Windows as separate VMs, or have I misunderstood?
Would that be advantageous CF dedicating an old atom mini pc to HAOS? It’s only 2Gb RAM 32Gb ROM Z8350.
My HA is quite complex & provides tides & local conditions live to my RNLI colleagues.
Hi David, running HA on a desktop virtualisation platform and even more, on Windows, is the worst you can do for a system that you want to be available 24/7.
+1 for Proxmox, have used various VMware products before (not with HA) but never looked back and my HA runs now on Proxmox.
The RAM on that ‘old Atom mini pc’ will be a bottleneck.
Why you just don’t use that mini-pc you are running HA on now but with a different setup.
Do you need Windows on that mini-pc?
Before you wipe anything, get a backup of the home assistant VM disk, and I’m pretty sure you can convert this and use it as the disk in proxmox, so no reinstalling and reconfiguring home assistant.
Thank you everyone. I’m girding my loins to putting proxmox on the current ha pc as suggested, & using the old atom for the 1 or 2 simple windows apps I need. I’ll copy a backup as well as the VB image to network storage first, I’m hoping I can get it back once I’ve promoxed the pc.
Wish me luck!
Depending on the spec of the machine running proxmox, you might not need the other machine at all, as you could just setup another VM in proxmox running windows
No experience on Windows, but barring a problem a few month ago when a linux kernel update broke VirtualBox, running Virtualbox under Linux has been trouble free for me for two years. For a while I was running daily snapshots just to be sure, but I found that just taking full backups of HA was sufficient to fully restore everything I needed.
Quick question before I go down this route - I’ve been using AnyConnect remote desktop to deal with problems when I’m away from home. Does something equivalent exist once I’m using ProxMox?
