Thanks for the input. I haven’t encountered that Bluetooth issue, but I know many folks are experiencing problems with Bluetooth dongles in Home Assistant. Have you considered using an ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy?
The Bluetooth Proxy is designed to connect to your Home Assistant instance via Wi-Fi and provide Bluetooth support. It might be a potential solution for your Bluetooth dongle issue. I have personally had great results using it.
I hadn’t really considered that, I had read about the BT proxies but had not yet dove deep on the topic, but they actually make sense given that my further-away BT devices do struggle to stay “available” in HA and I do have quite a few spare ESP32’s sitting around, I’ll give that a shot.
It would be nice for the built-in to work since a couple of my BT devices are within 5-10 feet of my HA server.
I’ve added one of my ESP’s as a bluetooth proxy and the install was dead simple. Should it also appear as another BT device on HA or does it do its thing silently? Should I remove the two existing BT adapters and run exclusively on the proxy?
Yeah right? it sounds much more complex than it really is.
It should be added as an ESPHome device and start doing it’s thing,
I guess you should try and check what works best for you, but I would give it a try running with all 3,
I ran the proxy exclusively.
Go back to the folder and edit the VMX file for your VM.
At the bottom add this line for the device(s) to auto connect. The name should be the name from the log file. If you need more than one device, just increment the number after ‘device’.
usb.autoConnect.device0 = "name:###name from log file####"
Start your VM back up. The devices should auto connect and show up under Settings → System → Hardware → All Hardware
Setting the VM to Start With Windows
Create a batch file
Navigate to your VM folder (really any folder will work).
Create a new text file. Name it whatever you’d like, just change the file extension to ‘.bat’
Paste the following line.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmrun.exe" -T player start "###full path to VMX file###" nogui
It should look something like this
(NOTE: I have the VMware folder in my path variable, so I don’t have to list the full directory location; if you haven’t done this or don’t know what it is, just use the text from above)
@FriedCheese thank you so much for this guide. So, what happens when the Host OS, Windows, shutdown or reboots? Home Assistant VM will not shutdown safely; and, may break the VM.
There should be a respective automated shutdown request via command-line; which can’t be done by the Windows Scheduled task. I’m guessing its possible to do this via NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager to launch the batch file you created, although I don’t use that. I use AlwaysUp instead, which I know for sure allows to add the respective shutdown command:
Home_Assistant_shutdown.bat
vmrun.exe" -T player stop "E:\VMWare\Home_Assistant\Home_Assistant.vmx nogui
If I’m not mistaken, stopping a VM is the equivalent of pulling power.
I never really solved this problem. With Windows Pro, you can set a shutdown policy to run a batch file during shutdown. I had one setup to ssh into HA and run a clean host shutdown, but it never worked really worked well. I think there’s a timeout after the script is called and that was shorter than the time it would take HA to fully shutdown. I tried adding a delay to the script but didn’t really test it. I ended up moving everything to a Proxmox setup where it’s not a concern.
I know exactly what you mean. I’ve setup mine with AlwaysUp (to handle startup and shutdown), when Windows wants to shutdown, it triggers the AlwaysUp-Home-Assistant service to shutdown… which triggers the shutdown script I just posted. However…
I now have very good reason to believe that the shutdown script doesn’t shutdown Home Assistant in time before the OS shuts down. In my case, this happened so many times that it eventually broke Home Assistant VM’s containers.
I wish I had seen the below URL sooner. I just noticed it. It shows 2 different solutions to make the OS wait long enough for the Home Assistant Windows service (created by AlwaysUp) to shutdown. I don’t think there is any other way. If you come up with a different solution that works, please post here. I will also do the same after I test this solution:
Great article, easy to follow, thank you !
I wanted to share an experience on VMWare upgrade for reference. I upgraded VMWare Player from 16 to 17 yesterday. VMWare popped a message saying a new version was available. I clicked and installed version 17 from that notification. After restart, my HA instance got stuck. It took me a while to find out HA didn’t get an ipv4 address anymore after the VMWare restart. I tried different commands, without any luck.
The only thing that helped was to fully uninstall VMWare Player, reboot, and install VMWare Player 17 again. After that, HA received an IPv4 address again.
Hope this helps for anyone with this issue in future.
I followed this guide, the only thing is that my sonoff 3.0 zigbee plus dongle isn’t recognized automatically
in Windows i see the device as a Silicon Laps CP210x device, and when i manually connect is to the VM i get an error in the message log: Driver error, is ther a solution for that error?
kind regards.
Alfred
Good guide for setting up HA on VMware. Thanks @SimplySmartHouse and @FriedCheese I was running HAOS as vm on VirtualBox (Windows host) for almost 2.5 years before switching to VMware Player 17 (free version) around middle of 2023.
For those running HA on VirtualBox I will add that once in while VMware may need additional manual maintenance (like shrink/compact disk), its still much more stable and long-running on Windows host. This makes VMware much much easier to manage than the constant monitoring and baby-sitting of the VirtualBox vm that is prone to memory issues, crashes and regular restarts/cycle every few days!
I agree. For me VMware is much more stable and an added benifit is that I run completly wireless without any issues on vmware including sunning a scrypted server and 4 cameras inside hass with no issues. Trying that in virtualbox will make you want to throw your pc against the wall because hass keeps disconecting.
Also @SimplySmartHouse great write up on setting up VMware!! For thaose that want to convert from virtualbos to vmware or just create a clean VM, create a complete hass backup and save it on your pc. Install hass on your vmware vm as decribed above(10 min) and then durring onbording select import backup and dang it is all done. Super fast and easy
Is there a way to share a drive from my pc to the HASS enviroment. I know we can do it the other way via the samba share addon but that does not meet the requirement. I have files that are created in windows that I want to read into Node-red and I want to eliminate the task of having to move them from my pc into the shared folder from HASS. I also wnat to use files from my idrive that come from my iphone and this would illiminate a bunch of steps.
I tried sharing the drives via vmware but it says you need to add vmware tools?
Chat GPT brought me to this thread.
Hi there!
I came here from Google after I had a crisis and my HASS got wiped and needed to reset it.
Can you add to the guide " check if you have USB device ENABLED" on machine setting ( near Remove both New CD/DVD (IDE) and Printer as they will not be used.) if you don’t have it enabled, Zigbee Adapter won’t be found.
I was running HAOS as vm on VirtualBox (Windows host) for almost 2.5 years before switching to VMware Player 17 (free version) around middle of 2023.