Step-by-Step Guide to Enabling the New OVA Import Feature in Proxmox 8.3

Proxmox recently added the ability to import OVA’s directly to your environment from the GUI. This guide will help you enable those capabilites and demonstrate the features by deploying a Home Assistant OVA. This guide requires your PVE environment to be running 8.3.0 or higher.

  1. Configure the Local Storage: Navigate to the Datacenter view and select the “Storage” panel.

dashboard

  1. Enable Import: Select your desired OVA storage location. In this example, we are using the “local” storage that also stores our ISO’s. Once the desired storage is selected, click the “edit” button.

storage

  1. Enable Import: From the “Edit” panel, expand the “Content” drop down menu and add “Disk image” and “Import” then press OK.

storage

  1. Navigate to the New Import Panel: From the panel view on the left, select the storage object we modified and navigate to the new “Import” section. For this example, we will be importing the Home Assistant OVA. Click on the “Download from URL” button.

storage

  1. Find your OVA: From the Home Assistant we can see they have the option download a prebuilt OVA.

storage

Right-click the VMWare ESXi/vSphere link and copy the link. At the time of writing this, it should look something like this:

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/13.2/haos_ova-13.2.ova
  1. Download the OVA: In the “Download from URL” window, paste the OVA url into the “URL” field. Then click the “Query URL” button. That should autopopulate the “File Name” field. Usually I would recommend selecting the Hash Algorithm to make sure the file is validated but I was unable to find one one the Home Assistant website. Press the “Download” button to bring the OVA file onto your system.

OVA

  1. Import the OVA: In the same “Import” panel, highlight the newly imported OVA and click the “Import” button seen in the screenshot below:

ImportOVA

  1. Set General Settings: When importing the VM, it’s important to note that most OVA’s are configured to run on ESXi. When Proxmox imports an OVA, it appears to default the settings to KVM/QEMU virtual harware and not VMWare/ESXi virtual hardware. Because of this, you may need to tinker with some of these settings to get an OVA to import and run smoothly. In the general tab, we’re only going to update the CPU to KVM64

GeneralOVA

GeneralOVAUpdated

  1. Set Advanced Settings: When I tested this initially, I experienced issues where the OVA would not boot after importing without changing any of the virtual hardware settings. I also needed to modify the virtual network adapter hardware and the virtual SCSI hardware. You can see where I’ve modified that below:

AdvancedOVA

As this OVA was developed for VMWare/ESXi, I picked VMWare virtual hardware and everything worked well after that. Don’t forget to click the “Import” button.

AdvancedOVAUpdated

  1. FIRE IT UP!: After the import dialog goes away, you’ll see your newly imported OVA on the side as a complete VM! You can select the VM, click the “Start” button and then click the “Console” button to watch it fire up.

OVAImported

  1. Summary: Hopefully everything went well for you in the process and you’ll have an imported OVA running Home Assistant. It certainly worked for me!

OVAImported

OVAImported