I decided to delete the VM and create another. Same exact steps followed as before line by line from the HA guide and same issue once again.
I created a third VM and after poking around a bit more I found that the .vdi file was ‘blocked’ by Windows. Not sure if this was the issue all along, but its working now!!
After finding the ‘read-only file system’ response from the CLI when trying to set a static IP I felt something maybe wrong with the image and surprisingly enough that may have been the case!
Yea, a permission issue for that VM file to load/run would keep it from interfacing with the host network card. I’ll have to keep that one on a tickler for HA/VM installs. Don’t feel bad about missing it. It is even worse with trying to things running on a MAC with it’s IOS.
My suspicion would be that Home Assistant Core was not in fact running, before - hence you didn’t have any problems loading the observer page, which meant the IP address and all routing was correct.
Home Assistant in the last release 2023.1.4 had a problem that caused it to immediately die when it encountered blank config files, it was fixed yesterday in 2023.1.5
