I have been running Home Assistant as a HA OS VM for a number of years in ESXi and then TrueNAS SCALE. I prefer having all of the supervised and other features that HA OS provide vs. other installation options HA supports.
Is it possible — or even desirable — to run HA OS as a system container? I’m trying to figure out what makes sense. My impression is that this probably wouldn’t work and that a VM would continue to be a better fit.
Background:
I recently found Incus, and it looks much closer to what I’ve been wanting for years than anything else I’ve come across.
Unified management of VMs and containers (now with system and app containers) with one UI sounds great for someone who is basically dabbling in all this stuff (primarily at home), especially when the mental “to do” list of things to tinker with only ever seems to grow.
Home Assistant (HA) Operating System (OS) is available as an image to run in a VM. It could be possible to set it up in a system container (compared to an Incus VM), though it would require to somehow convert the available image in a format that is usable for Incus system containers. It’s possible to do so, see the instructions at How to import physical or virtual machines to Incus instances - Incus documentation
And report back on the outcome.
The other option is to setup HAOS in an Incus VM.
The third option is to use the HA OCI container image from Linux - Home Assistant Incus supports OCI images, so it might be easily usable to install HA as such. This would probably be your last option because you cannot install HA plugins.
I ve tried the first option. Nothing fancy, just executed incus-migrate with the qcow2 image of hoas. It said the migration was successfull, but when i try to start the instance ( a container ), it says:
Error: Failed getting instance pool: Instance storage pool not found
Try incus info --show-log haos2 for more info
the log doesn t not help.
when i check the pool, i don t see the new container using it. It must be the problem, but i don t know how to solve it… Any suggestions?
I have incus 6 installed. qcow2 image support has been added in 6.6. Is there a way i could do a migration without installing from source?
i have debian bookworm.
root@dakara:~/Downloads# ls -lh *qcow2
-rw-r--r-- 1 stgraber domain admins 867M Nov 26 14:45 haos_ova-13.2.qcow2
root@dakara:~/Downloads# incus-migrate
The local Incus server is the target [default=yes]:
Would you like to create a container (1) or virtual-machine (2)?: 2
Project to create the instance in [default=default]:
Name of the new instance: haos
Please provide the path to a disk, partition, or qcow2/raw/vmdk image file: haos_ova-13.2.qcow2
Does the VM support UEFI booting? [default=yes]:
Does the VM support UEFI Secure Boot? [default=yes]: no
Instance to be created:
Name: haos
Project: default
Type: virtual-machine
Source: haos_ova-13.2.qcow2
Source format: qcow2
Config:
security.secureboot: "false"
Additional overrides can be applied at this stage:
1) Begin the migration with the above configuration
2) Override profile list
3) Set additional configuration options
4) Change instance storage pool or volume size
5) Change instance network
Please pick one of the options above [default=1]: 1
Converting image "haos_ova-13.2.qcow2" to raw format before importing
Instance haos successfully created
root@dakara:~/Downloads# incus start haos
root@dakara:~/Downloads#