Here are a quick guide to get Home Assistant OS running in Synology VMM.
Install Synology VMM (only supported on some models but I managed to get it to run on my DS716+II by downloading directly from Synology dsm6, dsm7, dsm7.2)
I would love to go the VM way, but sadly enough Synology only allows VMM to work with btrfs volumes and my DS920+ has one big ext4 volume. To use the VM I would have to backup the whole ext4 volume, delete, re-create a new btrfs volume and restore everything. Not something I am looking forward to, but I’m slowly starting to get used to the idea…
Just a quick note for those that already migrated to DSM7 and package from step 1 can’t be installed because it’s running service as root.
You have to download VMM from the DSM7 download center.
It’s again package for DS220+ but I was able to install it on my DS216+ which is officially not supported probably due to just 1GB of RAM by default. But I upgraded mine to 8GB and see no reason not to use virtualization on it
Import worked fine however I can’t connect to host:8123 after VM bootup from outside of Synology.
I’ve got impression it’s something with vSwitch.
Still investigating as this is my first time with vSwitch so takes so time
Well it means it went fine
Simply no issues during import.
Isn’t guest agent needed for that functionality? I don’t have IP listed for running machine.
But I managed to get that IP from ha cli. Somehow I thought that with vSwitch HA will be available on the same address as host but it got different IP from DHCP.
Anyway I’m now able to connect to my fresh HA instance running on VM
No, the vSwitch creates a new network-card so your router can give it an address.
You should be-able to import a snapshot and just continue like nothing happened from the “fresh installation” (I did that from my hassio instance, now just trying to figure out if I dare to move my “production” HA to this VM too)
So, no addresses shown in VMM (like my screenshot)?
Ad1) No. It doesn’t show IPs
But as you can see I also have no guest agent running. Did you install it somehow manually?
Ad2) Yeah it’s imported from ova.
Ad3) Yep it works this way.
Ok I did some tests. Using ova image is easier as it can be used in first step when creating VM but we’re loosing guest agent support this way.
Using qcow2 image needs extra steps as VMM doesn’t support them directly.
Image needs to be extracted first and added in image area of VMM.
It also means upload of 1.5G+ file instead of ~350MB but well… after installing from qcow2 it’s more functional than from ova.
It is possible to extract an ova image from the qcow2 installation. But, perhaps we should poke the hass-os guys to include guest-tools in the official ova build instead.
Yeah that would probably be the easiest way. Not sure why they didn’t include guest agent in these images.
But for now we shouldn’t probably ask people to use ova with Synology as it not only breaks reporting of IPs. It also means no possibility to shutdown / reboot VM without breaking stuff. VMM can’t shutdown VM cleanly without guest addon.
Installed on DS416Play. All Ok. OVA option boot properly but CPU usage is very high. All of time over 75-90%. Best settings for the VM is with 1 or 2 Cpu?
@frenck, do you know why the qmeu guest addon are starting from the qcow2 image but not from the official ova image? (I’ve built my own ova from the qcow2 image and as long as uefi is enabled the guest addon starts fine.)
Edit: nevermind, I think there is something in the ovf file that mess things up for Synology VMM… (Built an ova with the vmdk from the official one and that gets working guest addon).
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