New to HA. I have a brand new installation of HAOS running in a VirtualBox VM (running headless) on my Windows 10 desktop. [I have an HA Yellow on back order!] I always leave the browser up with the HA page in view. Occasionally I return to my computer to find a “connection lost” message on the page. It stays that way until I launch the VirtualBox Manager, where I can see messages start to scroll on the preview view, as if the act of launching the manager has somehow awakened the VM. Several of these messages mention watchdog timeouts. Not sure if these are coming from VirtualBox or HA. My computer is set to never sleep or hibernate, only to turn off the screen after 30 minutes. My power button is also set to only turn off the screen. All my other system processes and backups occur overnight to confirm this. And it doesn’t always happen when my computer is otherwise left idle, just once or twice a day.
I suspect that something is causing the VM or HAOS itself to sleep under some unknown circumstances. But I can find no settings to prevent this. I need this system to be more robust before trusting it with any long-term usage. Help?!
I believe these messages are actually generated AFTER I’ve launched the VirtualBox Manager…
I believe I’ve discovered and corrected the cause of my problem, as it has not happened in the days since I took action.
A nice bear trap in the rabbit hole that is Home Assistant (on Windows VirtualBox): Only one program or service at a time can use virtualization on a computer. Windows has many such features that might install and use Hyper-V, even without it appearing in the “Windows Features” list. Discovering which feature has claimed virtualization and how to disable it is VERY dependent on the system involved and too complex to describe here. As the VirtualBox log messages suggest: Google is your friend! BEWARE the Green Turtle!! I was unaware that a green turtle in the status bar of your VM is a VERY, VERY bad indicator. It means that VirtualBox is running in emulation mode rather than using true virtualization. It hides among other colorful icons there and it’s GREEN after all, so it should be GOOD, right?! Instead, you SHOULD see a blue IC chip icon with a “V”. There are also warnings in the VBox logs (look for “NEM”) but who looks at logs when HA seems to be running just fine? The watchdog timeout issues I experienced were very sporadic and random, probably caused by hiccups in the emulation that were perceived as stalled execution.
My HASS also seemed to run OK until it randomly hit these watchdog issues. Otherwise, I may never have noticed (or cared?) that it was running slowly in emulation mode. VMWare might have better emulation, avoiding crashes. But if you care about speed, you might want to check if your VMWare is running in slow emulation mode. Here’s an article discussing the issue:
Thanks, this was my issue too. I accidentally installed an Android app which enabled the “Virtual Machine Platform” feature. Disabled that, restarted my computer, VT-x is used properly in VirtualBox, and the platform as a whole is much more reliable now.
