I have bought a Aqara E1 hub. It’s a real pain to get it up and running since it is not supported. I have it working through HomeKit Connect and was able to connect one motion sensor to it. After a few hours, I stopped trying to connect the second one. It was not possible.
Since then I have read several articles. One said that when you run HA on a VM, there can be problems with the detection of the gateway. Can this be the case or should (another) Zigbee gateway like a ConBee II be detected out of the box by deConz?
I bought the Aqara zigbee kit a while back, because it was on sale and did not have enough on my plate
I’ve moved all my Aqara zigbee devices off the Aqara hub to zigbee2mqtt. I think if you pickup one of the under USD 20 Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongles and run zigbee2mqtt you will be a lot more happy. You can still keep the Aqara hub to do firmware upgrades (a bit of a pain to put a device back on Aqara and the move back to zigbee2mqtt but thats the price). The HomeKit part of your setup will require some more work to keep the devices you had on the Aquara still working in HomeKit, either using Home Assistant’s HomeKit integration (i have not used), or HomeBridge (I use and find very reliable, but I am thinking a bit more config work than the HA HomeKit route).
Cause, you don’t have enough I would also recommend learning and using Docker to run your various subsystems. VM’s are good as well but are much heavier than running things like Home Assistant, zigbee2mqtt and HomeBridge via Docker.
