Armbian with Virtualbox and Home Assistant

[greg396]

Dear Armbian-Enthusiasts!

 

I would like to install Armbian with Virtualbox, so that I can run Home Assistant (HA) in a VM environment (Intel chip .vdi) - yes, no container.

 

Would chose this image  "Armbian 25.11.1 Minimal / IOT 6.1 kernel" (rolling release)

 

Installing Virtualbox with:

sudo apt install virtualbox

 

Is this possible?

 

Best wishes, Greg

 

 

Links:

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux/

https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox

https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-5-plus/

 

[eselarm]

No; an Intel (virtual machine) image does not run natively on ARM (OPi5+). You need an ARM (virtual machine) image, but those are not available (at least not click-to-download). If you look in raw downlaod folders and/or github, maybe there are nowadays. Or ask on the forum there. You need a general Aarch64 UEFI HAOS image, qcow2 or raw/flat/img format and that will be able to run at full speed on a hypervisor. Not sure about VirtualBox, but for sure the Linux built-in QEMU/libvirtd/KVM. Main user-inteface program is installed via sudo apt install virt-manager. 

[greg396]

Dear eselarm, thank you for clarification! Really sad that there's no proper arm support yet. VM is really handy using snapshots.

[eselarm]

If you want snapshots, you can also do it on filesystem level. Look at Btrfs and snapper.

While testing HA 2 years ago, I also took the Intel VM image and made it work in a libvirt VM on an Atom J1900 board. Default size was 32G I think, way too big IMO. So I also took a clone of an existing Debian aarch64 VM (runs on RK3588 or BCM2711) and installed HA in there with supervisor method. I use Btrfs as filesystem, so do not take snapshot of VM image, but just Btrfs snapshot of the rootfs in that VM with HA. Also use Zstd compression, so much smaller than that 32G. But as a matter of fact, HA has good internal backup-restore, so that is also very useful, especially moving between Intel HA en Arm HA.