Running Home Assistant in a virtual machine (VM) on a VMware ESXi host in a home lab allows you greater flexibility and ease of management. By running Home Assistant in a VM, you can easily take snapshots and backups of the entire operating system and configuration, which can be useful for testing and troubleshooting.
Additionally, you can run other VMs on the same host, such as a VPN or a media server, and use ESXi’s built-in networking capabilities to easily connect all of the VMs.
This can also prevent the headache of needing to work out how to backup a dedicated physical machine running Home Assistant as backing up home assistant in ESXI is a piece of cake as we’ll explain below in our guide on How to Backup Home Assistant in ESXI.
Table of Contents
Backup Home Assistant in ESXi
Let’s take a look step by step at how to backup Home Assistant in ESXi.
For note, the method below demonstrates how to do this directly connected to the ESXi host in which your VM for Home Assistant is installed.
How to Backup Home Assistant in ESXi
Total Time: 2 minutes
Login
Depending on your setup login directly to the ESXI host, or vSphere if managing multiple hosts.
Find your Home Assistant VM
From your list of virtual machines find your Home Assistant VM (yours may be called something different)
Right click the VM to access the Snapshots menu
Right click on your Home Assistant VM, hover over the ‘Snapshots’ menu and click ‘Take Snapshot’
Name your snapshot
Name your snapshot and decide if you also want to snapshot the virtual machines memory (which is selected by default)
Wait until the snapshot completes
Wait until the snapshot completes, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes
Backing up Home Assistant in ESXi is relatively easy
Backing up Home Assistant in a virtual machine (VM) on a VMware ESXi host is relatively easy because of the built-in snapshot and backup capabilities of the ESXi hypervisor.
With the ability to take snapshots of the entire VM, including the operating system and configuration, you can easily roll back to a previous version of the Home Assistant installation if something goes wrong.
Scheduling Backups of Home Assistant in ESXi
Additionally, ESXi allows for easy scheduling of regular backups of the VM, which can be stored on a separate drive or network location. This allows for a simple and efficient way to protect against data loss and quickly recover from any issues that may occur.
Unfortunately backups can’t be scheduled via directly connecting to the ESXI host and instead use the vSphere application or web interface, this is beyond the scope of this article.
Restoring Backups of Home Assistant in ESXi
Restoring snapshots of Home Assistant in a virtual machine (VM) on a VMware ESXi host is relatively easy because of the built-in snapshot and restore capabilities of the ESXi hypervisor.
Here are the basic steps to restore a snapshot of a VM:
- Open the vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client and connect to the host running the VM that you want to restore.
- Right-click on the VM and select “Snapshot” from the context menu.
- Click on the “Snapshot Manager” button to open the Snapshot Manager.
- In the Snapshot Manager, select the snapshot you want to restore, and then click on the “Revert” button.
- Confirm the revert operation, the VM will be powered off and the snapshot will be applied, so the VM will be in the state it was when the snapshot was taken.
- Once the revert process is complete, power on the VM.
Summary
Compared to other options, running Home Assistant in a VM on ESXi offers a more streamlined and automated approach to backups and restores which is why it is my current preferred way to run Home Assistant within my home lab environment.
