Issue with running on headless Win 10 PC as a VM

I started with HA on my own home PC in a VMWare VM. I wanted to run HA on a separate machine so I bought an HP Elitedesk 800 G2 mini. I moved HA to that machine also running under VMWare VM and it’s running well. I set it up to autostart when the HP is rebooted. The issue that I have now is that I will be running the HP headless. If I were to reboot the machine, I don’t seem to be able to figure out how to get past having to enter the Windows password or PIN. Googling hasn’t helped much.

Is anyone running a similar setup and was able to get past this restriction? I want to be able to reboot the HP and just have it start, auto start the VM and have HA come up without me having to do anything other than starting the HP.

Thank you, David

If you have a dedicated machine, run either HA OS or something like Proxmox if you want VMs, instead of using Windows. Using Windows is the absolute last choice as far an OS for home automation goes.

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I am using VMWare on Windows and HA is running in the VM under Linux. It was my understanding that Proxmox and VMWare Player perform a similar function.

Agree with @kanga_who. If you run vmware you need to have a full windows install (ie even if you run headless the GUI is always up and using resources). If you run proxmox (I do on x86) it’s much more resource friendly and creating/managing VMs is a doddle.

That said you need to bypass the windows login. Search for “windows automatic login” which will show you how to do this.