Hi all,
I am running Home Assistant for a bit more than a year now and I like it a lot!
I run it on a dual core Atom board with 2GB ram and about 128GB of SSD. However, I want to migrate to ESX, this for a few reasons.
- Easier backups (backups are super slow on my machine and since there is no progress bar annoying). I’m just going to backup the VM every week and before an upgrade, making it easy to roll back.
- I want to run a separate VM with a database server on it to keep the logs that I want. Currently my .db file is over 30GB in size making it impossible to read anything of it in the interface. And it’s not even all data in it and only 30 days of data max (I do have a lot of sensors though and need to clean up what is stored and what not (35 Z-wave devices, all with several sensors, 6 smart sockets, presense detection, some Zigbee sensors, thermostat etc…)
- I want to have a separate Home Assistance VM running to do my testing and experimenting on before I move anything to my main VM. My current config has become very cluthered during the year of things that I tried, things that worked but didn’t anymore that are just commented out for later testing that never happened, some custom objects that I tried creating, etc…
What exactly is recommended?
I tried the VMDK that is for download on the site. It looked lightweight and it is. I run it currently on 1vCPU and 2GB of ram. However, I don’t know how to get out of the crappy CLI that it provides. I can’t do anything in it. I wasn’t able to change the root password currently, I wasn’t able to turn on SSH, set a fixed IP (did it at my DHCP server for now), etc…
For the people running it on ESXi, what are you running it on? It must be able to connect with USB devices (as I use a Zigbee2MQTT stick, a 334Mhz antenna and a Z-wave stick).
For people using a separate device as database, what are you using? Both as OS and as database? I was thinking Graphite + a combination with the normal history component (but only of 2 days and only some sensors I think, just to view history info in the dashboard).
Would it be possible to fire off sensors or actions on the other VM from the testVM? That would help a lot as Z-wave devices can link to only one of them.