Home Assistant beginners

+1 for only using the ZigBee controller attached to HA. Never owned a Philips/Tapo etc hub, everything just works directly with HA.

Also +1 for Z2M, I moved to it a few months after starting with HA and haven't looked back.
 
Dr House said:
Thanks again I have ordered the SLZB06U
Click to expand...

How much was it ?
I remember when these first came out there were only a few and around the £40-45 now there are so many variants costing up to £80+ :confused:

Which is the best one to go for ?

I understand the network dongle offers a degree of redundancy but is it worth it ?
If I do have to migrate my HA instance to a new machine it's a simple mater of migrating the VM and swapping over the Zigbee dongle. Everything just works
 
robj20 said:
I had and people keep telling me to go that route but it's just more to learn. My Plex machine is plenty powerful enough it runs windows 11 and just Plex, works perfectly (I struggled getting it working under Ubuntu)

I've gone down the rabbit hole of reading about entity ID naming conventions and best practices not using device id instead use entity. Just getting Home Assistant working is proving challenging enough I don't then need to with about learning about virtual this and docker that.
Click to expand...
I get that, but if you're already running Windows and are comfortable with that, it's almost nothing extra to learn if you know how to install an application. You literally just need to download/install VMware Workstation (it's free now with a free VMware account) and you can visually create/start/stop/pause/snapshot virtual machines from within the Vmware Workstation GUI. HA even have a Vmware Workstation image ready to go that you just power on with no HA setup to do: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/. It's a tidy solution because you don't need to mess with Hyper-V (which has it's drawbacks with HA) or start learning Docker and everything in the VM is contained and will have no impact on your existing Plex server. The virtual machine OS in the HA image is HAOS and is managed by Open Home Foundation, so they push both HA patches and updates as well as HAOS patches and updates which are all installed from within the HA GUI itself. You don't need to worry about learning and maintaining Ubuntu or some other flavour of Linux. It really is a no brainer :)
 
cokecan said:
I get that, but if you're already running Windows and are comfortable with that, it's almost nothing extra to learn if you know how to install an application. You literally just need to download/install VMware Workstation (it's free now with a free VMware account) and you can visually create/start/stop/pause/snapshot virtual machines from within the Vmware Workstation GUI. HA even have a Vmware Workstation image ready to go that you just power on with no HA setup to do: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/. It's a tidy solution because you don't need to mess with Hyper-V (which has it's drawbacks with HA) or start learning Docker and everything in the VM is contained and will have no impact on your existing Plex server. The virtual machine OS in the HA image is HAOS and is managed by Open Home Foundation, so they push both HA patches and updates as well as HAOS patches and updates which are all installed from within the HA GUI itself. You don't need to worry about learning and maintaining Ubuntu or some other flavour of Linux. It really is a no brainer :)
Click to expand...
Okay I'll take a look, and it will just see the ZigBee USB that's plugged into the pc? I thought you needed to do things like route then through to the VM?

I'll have a play on my gaming pc first see if I can get it up and running.

Little confused already, it says if you are already running a VM follow the guide, what if you are not already running one?
These seem to be better instructions.
smarthomepursuits.com

How To Install Home Assistant using VMware Workstation

<p><strong>In this guide, I will show you how to migrate Home Assistant from a raspberry pi to VMWare Workstation 16 Player.</strong></p> <p>Or, if you don't ha
smarthomepursuits.com smarthomepursuits.com
Then to get it all auto starting on bootup.
 
Last edited:
For USB devices, you select the VM config menu, then Removable Devices. It should list all removable devices you have plugged into your computer and you just select which one you want to passthrough to the VM. To make that passthrough permanent which will persist through restarts etc, you just modify one line of the VM config file in notepad.

I'd just follow the official guide: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/#hypervisor-specific-configuration. Select Vmware Workstation from the tabs
 
Could actually work out well this way, Its easy to tempt access this machine with the windows remote service, even using the app on my phone.
It has a few tweaks such as auto user login so it goes straight to the desktop when it boots up. Plex runs in the background.

I'll definitely have a play tonight on my other machine get home assistant running and the network stuff.
Then I'll try it on the Plex server.

How much resources should I allocate it?
It's a Core 5 120U (2 perf, 8 efficient )and has 32gb RAM and a 1TB m.2.
 
That's great to hear :)
You can set basic startup scripts that run when the computer auto logs in which will start the VM if you ever restart the computer to save you having to manually start them with something like:
Code: 
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" start "C:\VM\HA.vmx"
in a simple bat file. Just place the file in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

My VM is using almost nothing; 4GB RAM, 2x processors, 32GB storage. I'm running a HP EliteDesk 800G4 Mini with an i5-8500T. I think HA say you can run 2-4GB for general use and maybe 4-8GB for heavy HA use or lots of add-ons etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom