How to install HASS on OpenMediaVault on a Virtual Machine?

Installation
#1

I would like to run Home Assistant (HASS) in a virtual machine on OpenMediaVault 5. Up until OMV 4, this was easy because OMV (and the underlying Debian) supported VirtualBox and VB apparently didn’t have any problems booting UEFI images. Because OMV 5 (and the underlying Debian 10) no longer support VirtualBox, OMV now uses KVM ( libvirt ) for virtual machines (and it supports Cockpit to manage them). Unfortunately, this entails that it is no longer trivial to boot UEFI images on OMV/Debian 10, and - you guessed it - the official Home Assistant image for KVM (QCOW2) needs UEFI and trying to import and boot it in Cockpit will fail. I was unable to find any button or command in Cockpit that allows me to set the boot mode to UEFI.

I somehow managed to figure it out and documented my solution here:

Home Assistant virtual machine cannot access Open Media Vault 5 server
#2

Book marked for future reference.

I’ve been pondering putting Hass on my OMV server for a wile. I updated OMV to ver 5 a few weeks ago. And was not aware of the underlying system changes to the virtual side of things.

Thanks.

#3

@tophee I am also on the same path and plan to move my Home Assistant installation from my RPi3 to my server with an OMV installation.

Since you have already a working solution, how do to you do USB passthrough to Home Assistant in KVM? I have to pass through Bluetooth and ZigBee Stick to the Guest machine.

#4

I also moved my installation to OMV.
Didn’t install home assistant in a VM, just followed this guide, it’s quick and easy: Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10

The connected hardware will be automatically found. Navigate to supervisor > system and click the hardware menu option under Host System.
Use the ‘by-id’ address of your device in your settings.

#5

@kdw2060

Thank you for the suggest. I was thinking of this solution, too. Can you tell me why you did not used the official Supervised Installation method?

And, did you have any problems running OMV and Home Assistant on the same machine parallely?

#6

I think that community guide follows the official supervised installation method, it’s mentioned at the start of the guide that this will give you a supported official install. The installation documentation at https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ still hasn’t been updated to include the supervised method.

As for issues, no not really. Occasionally the HA url will be unavailable for like 10-20 seconds, but I think that’s more down to the Nic on my motherboard.

#7

Good to hear, I am a little bit worried because I heard so many horror stories about parallel installations. And I saw that HA is changing the /etc/network/interfaces files which is also changed by OMV.

However, today I run a test with this set up on my Desktop in a virtual machine which was quite successful. I will test a little bit more and consider a migration.

#8

I’ve put my HA installation on ice and am currently trying OpenHAB… But USB passthrough is not specific to Home Assistant, so I think I can help you out nonetheless. I solved this as described here: https://blog.tinyhost.de/blog/2020-05-01_libvirt_usb.html

The reason why I did not install HA directly on Debian/OMV is because I want to keep my server OS (which is in charge of much more than home automation) separate from a specific software/task.

#9

I understand this. However, I am currently really struggling to set up a bridged network on OMV to properly set up Home Assistant as KVM VM on OMV. As a consequence, I am properly put this on ice.

I am now focusing my endeavours to have it as supervised installation on OMV. Does anyone know if an uninstall is possible in case something goes wrong? Can I uninstall the Home Assistant Supervised Installation again if something goes wrong?

#10

I described how I solved this here:

#11

I suppose you can always try to uninstall or undo everything the installation script (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kanga-Who/home-assistant/master/supervised-installer.sh) does with the reverse terminal commands.

I guess there’s upsides to a VM install that I don’t see, but personally I see no reason to fear the supervised install method. A lot of the Home Assistant components will be running in docker anyway, so also kinda separated from the OMV/Debian OS.

Portainer-Home-Assistant
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#12

Hello. I realize this topic is old, but I would like to inform any people looking to install HA as a VM on OMV 5 that as of 2021 there is a KVM pluging available.

After 1-2 days of pains trying to install HA as a VM using Cockipt, I came accross the below topic (and specifically post 96) which explains how to create a VM using this plugin - it is 100 times easier than in Cockpit and it also works, I just managed to connect to my brand new HA installation after ~2 days of unsuccesfull trials using Cockpit.

also, in this pluging you can enable UEFI and also you can create a bridge connection, without which you will not be able to install in Cockpit, for example

Hope it helps. I will come back here to report after everything will have been running for at least 1 month.

#13

Hi liviumac,

Good to hear you got it working. I’m trying to use the KVM plugin with home assistant as well.

How did you add/import the home assistant .qcow2 file as a drive?

Update: Actually I got it working, just had to copy the .qcow2 file into the pool directory and it found it.

Thanks

#14

Yep, just copy it :slight_smile:

By the way, if you used to run HA as a VM in OMV 4 using Virtual Box, you can also convert the vdi used in virtual box to qcow2 and so you have your existing HA out of the box

Just google how to convert, it’s just a simple linux command

#15

ok guys, for anyone looking to install HA as a VM in OMV5 using KVM, please note that if you use a Macvtap Bridge, you will NOT be able to access the host machine, so inteegrations such as NUT, OMV etc will not work

instead, you need to setup a bridge in OMV interface and use that for your VM

more details here

#16

Sorry to dig such an old topic.
I’m really new to VMs, so I’m struggling getting the HA VM running. I have OMV6 and KVM pluggin installed. Right now I’m running HAOS on a RaspPi, but I would like to use it in the same system I have OMV running (x64 machine) and free the RaspPi.
I still can’t understand how to choose the Disk. I put the haos_ova-8.2.qcow2 file in the pool folder, but it doesn’t appear in the “optical drive” dropdpwn menu. It actually appears in the “storage volume” menu. If I click in “volume” menu, I see the file. What am I missing here?
And btw, which OS do you choose when creating the VM?

#17

Follow my Proxmox VM guide and replace Proxmox tasks with the hypervisor of your choice.