FYI: It hasn’t been called hassio since June when it was renamed to Home Assistant OS. The old name is no longer found anywhere in the official documentation.
Given that you are a new user, where did you read the old name that led you to adopt it? If it’s hiding somewhere in the official documentation, it will need to be corrected. If you read it on someone’s blog post or video, you were using outdated information.
The four official ways of installing Home Assistant are described here:
What you are proposing is installing Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine. Installation instructions can be found in the documentation:
Installing Home Assistant OS - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
A device based on a NodeMCU can communicate with Home Assistant via Home Assistant’s native API or via MQTT. It all depends on what kind of firmware you choose to program the NodeMCU.