KVM install of Home Assistant

Configuration
1

I’m successfully running Home Assistant on a KVM VM following the formal install guide (Linux - Home Assistant).

I need a second VM which talks to my Elk-M1 security system to connect to the HA VM but I’m stuck with the networking setup.

While this is a KVM networking question (I have posts on KVM forums) I was wondering whether anyone here is having a similar setup where more than 1 KVM VM needs to talk to each other (192.168.122.x) while one (HA) is also communicating to the Internet.

2

Have you tried setting up a kernel bridge, often named br0, that the VMs and the host’s Ethernet interface are connected to?

3

I have parked this for a while and use the RPi for the time being but will check out br0 when I get back to it. Thanks

4

I run HA on KVM alongside 4 other VMs, have done for years. I’ve always used bridged networking, which gives the VM native access to the host’s network. For my home network I don’t need to segment the VMs behind the host, and it makes networking a lot simpler.

5

Let’s say you were a complete noob and didn’t know how to setup bridged networking for your VMs… how might you go about setting it up? Asking for a friend…

6

Your friend could try googling “KVM bridged networking”. It is not hard to find guides.

Summarised… you define a bridge interface on the host which includes the physical interface as a bridge-slave, define a libvirt bridge network, and then in your VM definitions define use of the bridge.

The VM then comes up as being on the LAN, and can use DHCP or static IP as normal.

7

Here is a reference:

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