Is there any way to install home assistant on a physical windows 11 machine as a “normal” application? Alternatively, is there a home assistant cloud enabled environment in-which a cloud account can be created, comparable with e.g. Sunnyportal?
Not as a plain windows application, no.
The only way would be to use the Container installation under Docker Desktop (but not sure that actually works) or use a virtual machine hypervisor like VirtualBox.
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What Chris said - and honestly, you don’t WANT to.
it’s not a ‘normal’ application as you referred to.
- HA is a server - its intended to be ON 24x7.
- you can virtualize HA inside windows, it’s an advanced config that takes care and feeding and I do NOT recommend it. You’re honestly better off virtualizing Windows on the same box you virtualize HA in.
- HA controls local hardware - whenever you add cloud, you’re adding lag and round trips, you CAN virtualize HA inside a cloud property - but you shouldn’t. I’m on the record many times - it’s inadvisable. Also at cloud virt fees you might as well buy the box.
Which brings us to finally, you can get a perfectly good machine to run HA for less than 200 USD (likely even less).
Why make a sub optimal experience that takes more care and feeding or money to run? Doesn’t make sense.
I wouldn’t run HA on my Windows box for anything more than - does this work and what color is it…
That means, if I paid you 20/hr. it takes exactly 10 hrs. of your time banging your head against a wall before you should have just bought the machine and installed HAOS or HAOS on proxmox. You’ll easily burn more than 10 hrs. trying to learn virtualization, install HA on a windows box - keep it performant, research usb passthroughs and figure out how to make them stable… …maybe… (See where Im going with this?)
Its a server - not an app.
What for?
I guess it would be fine for experimentation, but HA is meant to run 24/7 online. Installing it on a VM in a machine meant to be turned off is going to create problems for you.
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I am running HA under Win 11 for 5 years now - not a single problem!
Using the VM from VMware.
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Cool. How do you handle when HA needs to go down because Windows Update reboots your box?
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I do nothing!
Windows updates at 2 o’clock in the morning if needed, shuts-down, restarts and when it is up and running again, it automatically starts the Virtual Machine and also HA.
Unless you go the logs, you wouldn’t even know it happened.
A simple re-start of HA takes exactly 40 seconds on my machine.
If the VM is also restarted (e.g. after an update of Windows), you are looking at around 150 seconds until HA is up and running.
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many thanks for all input. I consider now to install HA on a ModeMCY V3 board based on an ESP8266 processor which I can access via Arduino IDE. Has someone some experience how to install H step by step on this SBC?
again without spelling mistakes 
: many thanks for all input. I consider now to install HA on a NodeMcu V3 board based on an ESP8266 processor which I can access via Arduino IDE. Has someone some experience how to install HA step by step on this SBC?
Are you sure this question is correct? Or is it ESPHome you are looking for?
not sure, this question I asked myself many times. What is the difference? Perhaps I do not fully understand the concept of HA?
You have no chance of installing Home Assistant on an ESP8266. Here’s a link for the different installation methods and suggested hardware Installation - Home Assistant
ESPhome is a client to HA and allows to build intelligent sensors as an input/output to HA, right? I have a qnap NAS, I’lll try to use that to install HA.
Yeah, that’s the gist of it. QNAP is a good starting point for installing HA, you can either deploy HAOS as a virtual machine or use container station to deploy the container version.