Home Assistant on vSphere 7.0

All my home lab run on vSphere 7, my Raspberry Pi is too old with his 256MB RAM, so let’s see how to run Home Assistant on our vSphere.

I followed this link :
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux

You can download a vmdk on their webpage, here is the link for lazy people :
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/10.4/haos_ova-10.4.vmdk.zip

Ok while your browser download it, connect to your vSphere to create a new virtual machine.
Choose as a Guest OS family : Linux and Version : Other Linux 4.x or later kernel 64-bit

Home Assistant recommend a minimum of 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 32 GB Storage but we don’t need to create a storage here since we’ll use the VMDK we are downloading right now!

On CPU you can edit Cores per Socket to set it as 1 socket.
Delete the Hard disk, delete SCSI Controller, delete SATA Controller, and delete CD/DVD Drive, you should get something like this :

Clic Next and then Finish.

Your VMDK download should be done, unzip it and go to your datastore > Datastore browser > select your new VM folder and then clic on Upload and select your VMDK (haos_ova-10.4.vmdk)

Let’s go back to your Home Assistant VM, and Edit settings, clic on Add hard disk > Existing hard disk and select your new VM folder and select haos_ova-10.4.vmdk or select the new disk home-haos-001.vmdk (check below to understand how to create it)

So, for me I wasn’t able to run this vmdk directly on a VM.
I was stuck with this error :

Unsupported and/or invalid disk type

Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.
Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:0, '/vmfs/volumes/datastorename/VirtualMachineHome/VirtualMachineDisk.vmdk'
Failed to open disk scsi0:0: Unsupported and/or invalid disk type 7. Did you forget to import the disk first?

There is a KB about this error on VMware website :
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1028943

So you need to login to your vSphere server and you’ll need to use vmkfstools

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/dsm-home-01/home-haos-001/haos_ova-10.4.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/dsm-home-01/h
ome-haos-001/home-haos-001.vmdk

haos_ova-10.4.vmdk is our vmdk downloaded and home-haos-001.vmdk will be the new vmdk.

Then now we got our Hard disk 1, but we need to add a SCSI Controller, Add other device > SCSI Controller
On SCSI Controller select LSI Logic SAS and on your Hard Disk 1 select SCSI controller 0 and then SCSI (0:0)

You should get something like that :

Save and start your VM and Voilà !

Enjoy your home assistant 🙂

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Maxence

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