Home Assistant Virtual Machine in Synology

Home Assistant Virtual Machine in Synology

Thanks for your response. Very much appreciated and all the advice to date has been fantastic and really helped me on my NAS journey!

By way of an update.

My DS1621xs+ with 3x4Tb SSDs and 10Gb SFP+ is awesome, lightning fast:)

I upgraded to the DSM v7 as it shipped with v6, then installed Plex as an app (latest version from the Plex site, not the Beta as shown in the package centre) as per your advice. The migration from my RPi to the NAS was as easy as sign-out of flex on the RPi, install on the NAS, sign in. Boom. Job done.

The HA was more tricky (because I didn’t really know what I needed to do!). I had seen / read the link below (and many others) before the NAS arrived but I followed the link below instructions. Everything went well but I quickly leaned that HomeAssistant (and not Hass.io) doesn’t easily support add-ons via the Supervisor menu in HA, so I removed that and went in search of another / better solution…

I came across this video on HA in a VM:

This options works perfectly. It allowed for a backup of the HA on my RPi and a restore onto the new NAS with relatively few problems.

Now, I have a fully functional, vanilla Hass.io running as a VM on my NAS. Perfect, only its still on my LAN, not IoT VLAN.

Fortunately, using the VM method, this is a VERY easy fix. Simply create a new ‘HA LAN’ in the HomeAssistant VM config and add the VLAN Tag to that new network. Next time the VM starts, it has an IoT IP allocated

Now to restore my RPi HA backup onto the NAS…
Over and above the instructions in the video, I found that my backup was >1Gb. To solve this problem I had to install the SAMBA add-on on the NAS vanilla HA build, connect to the (HA) /backup folder of the new NAS and copy the backup file into it. Once done I could select the backup to restore. Before I restored though, I changed the IP address of HA from DHCP assigned to static, giving it the same IP as the old (now switched off RPi). Next problem was that it wouldn’t restore the whole thing at once (complaining that the backup was too large (again)). So, I restored the Core, then separately and selectively restored the add-ons.

The only slight downsides are:
1. that I have a couple of cores allocated to the VM, not sure if I could drop this to 1 or not. I’ll play with that once I get used to the thing running so that I can judge performance etc.
2. Memory. It uses 4.5Gb of the standard 8Gb even when its just sat working in the background.

That being said, the advantages massively outweigh the memory overhead. On this particular machine, the xenon processor hangs around 1-3% utilised unless Im stressing it with large code compiles etc.

I suspect this might make a good video for your DS1621xs+ series, there is nothing out there that pulls all the bits of the puzzle together. But when it comes together, its awesome!

 

 

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