So, you’ve been using Home Assistant for a while now and decided to move from the Raspberry Pi to something more powerful. You picked up a cheap used Intel NUC Mini PC or maybe a refurbished Dell Optiplex and you want to deploy it as your main Home Assistant server. 
That’s all great, only you find out your NUC is really overpowered and would like to have the option to run something else in parallel to your Home Assistant instance. You’ve come across Promox a few times within the community, but thought that it might be too complicated for you to setup and maintain.
Well, developer tteck created a bunch of helper scripts for deploying various different VMs within Promox with simple commands, streamlining the setup process significantly. We can use it to spin up a Home Assistant OS VM in Proxmox and if needed, customize the dedicated resources the VM will use.
We can use these helper scripts to also setup a Zigbee2MQTT VM and separate it from Home Assistant, so it’s always up and running in case of Home Assistant failure. Follow along if you want to find out how to do it.
If you already have Proxmox up and running, jump to Installing Home Assistant on Proxmox section and continue from there.
What’s Proxmox?
Proxmox VE is a complete, open-source server management platform for enterprise virtualization. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage and networking functionality, on a single platform. With the integrated web-based user interface you can manage VMs and containers, high availability for clusters, or the integrated disaster recovery tools with ease.
For the smart home use case, we can utilize Proxmox and it’s capabilities do deploy different VMs for Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, MQTT Broker or maybe Plex Servers and similar. This will allow you to really utilize the mini PC you just bought.
Create a Proxmox Bootable USB Drive
Before installing Proxmox on your new Mini PC, first, you need to create a bootable USB Drive with the latest version of Proxmox. You can do this by flashing the ISO file either with Balena Etcher or Rufus.
1. Download Balena Etcher and install it
2. Download the latest Proxmox VE ISO Installer and save it
3. Insert the USB drive in your PC
4. Open Balena Etcher and click Flash from file
5. Select the Proxmox ISO file you just downloaded
6. Click Select target and choose your USB Drive
7. Click Flash and wait for the process to finish
8. Depending on the speed of your USB Drive, the process should take ~2-5minutes
9. You will get a Flash complete! confirmation
10. Close Balena Etcher
11. Safely remove hardware (USB)
12. You are ready to install Proxmox on your Mini PC
Install Proxmox on your Mini PC
1. Plug in the USB Drive you just created in your Mini PC
2. Power it on, and navigate to BIOS (Usually by pressing DEL or F10 key during boot)
– Depending on your model, the BIOS will look differently and certain things may be labelled differently. But in general, you need to tweak the following settings:
– Make sure Secure Boot is disabled
– Make sure Legacy Boot is enabled
– Make sure Virtualization Technology is enabled
3. Save your BIOS settings and reboot
4. Enter your Boot Order Menu (Usually F8 key)
5. Select your USB Drive and hit enter
6. You will be presented with the Proxmox Welcome Screen
7. Select Install Proxmox VE
8. Accept the License Agreement and hit Next
9. Select the Hard Drive you want to install Proxmox to and hit Next
10. Select your Country, Time zone and Keyboard layout
– Make sure select the correct information, as Proxmox is heavily reliant on the time zone to synchronize everything
11. Set a password and e-mail and click Next
– Password needs to be at least 8 characters, containing letters and numbers
– You will use this password for the initial Proxmox login
– E-mail is used for alert notifications (backup failures etc.)
12. Setup your Network configuration and click Next
– Set Hostname (pve.proxmox or pve.smarthomescene)
– IP Address, Gateway and DNS Settings should automatically populate if you have the Mini PC plugged to your home network
13. Wait for the process to finish
14. Installation successful should appear on the screen
15. Click Reboot and after a couple of minutes you can access your Promox server from the IP address you gave it
Installing Home Assistant on Promox
1. Open your Proxmox instance by navigating to IP_Address:8006 from your main PC
2. You will get a warning message Your connection is not private
3. Click Advanced and click Proceed to IP_Address
4. On the Promox login screen login with the credentials:
– Username: root
– Password: password you set during installation
5. You will get a message saying you do not have a valid subscription
– This is showing up because you don’t have a valid enterprise license
– We will clean this up with a script too
6. Before we deploy Home Assistant, we need to update Proxmox packages
7. On the left side of the screen, select your VM and click Updates
8. Click Refresh and click Upgrade
9. A dialog window will popup, going through the available package updates
10. You may get another license warning, just ignore it
11. If you get a confirmation dialog, type in “y” and hit enter
12. If you get a dialog asking the Keyboard encoding select UTF-8 and English
13. You will get a your system is up to date message
14. Close the window and you are done
15. If you click Refresh again, the package list should disappear since you already updated them
16. To Install Home Assistant, we are going to use a script by tteck which will automate the process significantly
17. Running this script will:
– Find, download and extract the official KVM (qcow2) Home Assistant OS image
– Define user settings, import and attach disk, set boot order and start the VM automatically
– Install the VM with Default Settings: 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage and 2vCPU cores
– Settings can be tweaked during installation
18. Click your VM on the left and select Shell
19. Copy the following command to run the script and hit enter:
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"
Code language: YAML (yaml)
20. The wizard will ask you to confirm that you want to create a Home Assistant OS VM
21. Select Yes and click confirm
22. On the next screen, choose either Default settings or Advanced
– Default settings are fine for a Home Assistant OS install, but you can assign more RAM and Storage if you need to
23. If you choose Advanced Settings, you will be prompted to choose:
– Home Assistant OS Version (Stable, Beta)
– Hostname
– VM Machine ID
– Machine type
– Allocated CPU Cores
– Allocated RAM Memory
24. Select the final Yes to confirm
25. Wait for the script to download, extract and install the latest KVM image of HA OS
26. Once you get a Completed Successfully message, HA is installed
27. To see the IP address your router assigned to your Home Assistant VM instance, click your node on the left
28. Select your newly created Home Assistant VM
29. The IP address is displayed in the middle
– Use it to access Home Assistant in your web browser 192.168.xxx.xxx:8123
30. Finished, you’ve just install HA OS on Proxmox!
(Optional) USB Passthrough to Home Assistant VM
If you use a Zigbee or a Z-Wave dongle, there is one additional step you must do in order to allow the Home Assistant VM to read your attached USB device.
1. Attach your USB Device (Zigbee dongle) to your Mini PC
2. Select your Home Assistant VM on the left
3. Select Hardware from the Menu
4. Click Add at the top bar
5. Select USB Device
6. Select Use USB Vendor/Device ID from the menu
7. Select your USB Device (Zigbee/Z-Wave Dongle)
8. Click Add
8. At the top corner, press the small arrow next to Shutdown
9. Choose Reboot and confirm to restart the VM
10. If you navigate to Home Assistant, you USB dongle will be auto-discovered
(Optional) Post Install Proxmox VE 7 Script
This step is optional, but I highly suggest you run this script too as it will clean up your Proxmox Virtual Environment, get rid of the Enterprise message that keeps pestering you, add or correct repositories and update Proxmox VE.
To run this script, select your node on the left and click Shell again:
1. Copy the following code in the Shell and hit enter
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/misc/post-pve-install.sh)"
Code language: YAML (yaml)2. You will get a couple of confirmation prompts
3. Answer “y” to all of them and finally confirm to reboot Proxmox
4. Done
Summary
Deploying Home Assistant on a Proxmox Virtual Environment using these scripts is a breeze. Developer tteck made it a seamless process that even the non-technical can follow. He has a bunch of scripts on his repository, which allow you to further customize your Home Assistant installation in a VE. For example:
- Install Zigbee2MQTT as a separate VM
- Install MQTT Mosquitto Broker as separate VM
- Install ESPHome as a separate VM
- Install MariaDB as a separate VM
- Install InfluxDB as a separate VM
- Deploy AdGuard or Pi-Hole for system-wide ad blocking
- Deploy Tailscale for easy remote access
The advantage of deploying these Home Assistant add-ons separately is they will be independent of Home Assistant and it’s current state (installing, rebooting, breaking changes etc). You can connect them together and setup HA to read data from each one, operating as it should. I intend to cover the process in a separate tutorial.
If you are looking to replace that old Raspberry Pi, this is the way to go, especially if you are not familiar with virtual machines and Linux environments. Consider buying him a coffee for creating these awesome scripts.
UPDATE 29.03.2023: A pro tip for setting the disk cache option on HAOS to writethrough greatly lowers the chance of a corrupted database on Proxmox. Thanks Derek!
Amazing and useful post
Thank you!
Going forward, versioning will no longer be utilized in order to avoid breaking web-links in blogs and YouTube videos (for the final time). So, as a result, the name of the shell script has been updated from `haos-vm-v5.sh` to `haos-vm.sh` .
Hey,
Thank you for stopping by.
I will update the code and thanks again for creating these awesome scripts!
Cheers!
Databases can be very sensitive to sudden power loss. This is less of an issue on bare metal, but is a big concern in virtual environments. The hypervisor may do caching/buffering that the DB is not expecting and can result in irrecoverable DB corruption. I would strongly urge Proxmox users to set the disk cache option on the HAOS VM to “writethrough” to greatly lessen the chance of lost writes that cause corruption.
Thank you for the tips Derek, I will add them to the post.
Cheers!
I would also suggest adding an optional step to opt-in to the latest 6.x kernel that Promox offers. This can really help with hardware compatibility/drivers, particularly on newer Intel platforms.
Me getting to the end and there is no zigbee2mqtt instructions :.(
Hey, I decided to write a dedicated tutorial for separating Zigbee2MQTT from Home Assistant in Proxmox.
It involves covering and fixing a lot of potential issues.
Stay tuned, will release it in a couple of days.
Cheers!
Hey Jezza,
Here it is:
https://smarthomescene.com/guides/how-to-separate-zigbee2mqtt-from-home-assistant-in-proxmox/
Cheers!
The script produces an error on Proxmox 7.4-3:
Using Default Settings
Using HAOS Version: 9.5
Using Virtual Machine ID:
Using Machine Type: i440fx
Using Disk Cache: Default
Using Hostname: haos9.5
Using CPU Model: Default
Allocated Cores: 2
Allocated RAM: 4096
Using Bridge: vmbr0
Using MAC Address: 02:63:F2:9B:5E:DE
Using VLAN: Default
Using Interface MTU Size: Default
Start VM when completed: yes
Creating a HAOS VM using the above default settings
– Validating Storage…bash: line 362: pvesm: command not found
numfmt: invalid number: ‘\033[01;31m362\033[m:’
[ERROR] in line 355: exit code 2: while executing command FREE=$(echo $line | numfmt –field 4-6 –from-unit=K –to=iec –format %.2f | awk ‘{printf( “%9sB”, $6)}’)
My error – the script ran fine once I used root on Proxmox
Thanks for this guide and thanks to the Dev for the scripts.
Can I ask I’m wanting to do this mainly for
HassOS,
ZigBee2Mqtt & Node red.
But there’s about another 4 on that list I would like also and each ones shows default ram and CPU cores,
so say I want 8 small VMs that say they need 1gb ram each and 1-2 CPU cores would that mean I need a system with 8gb Ram and 8-16 CPU cores 😲
Or are you not meant to add them together like that.
No, no need. All containers share the kernel and resources of the PC, so you can get away with less.
It largely depends on what you intend to run though
The final script did not work. I put it in (3x – copied twice and then typed a third) – system just went to the next line. No evidence anything happened. Ideas??
Which script are you reffering to?
I believe he is referring to the wget command bash -c “$(wget -qLO – https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)”.
I am also having the same issue. In the shell entering the above command does nothing.
Hello,
The command is correct, I’ve just tested it. Are you sure you are pasting it correctly?
Try typing it out manually and let me know.
Awesome stuff. Thank you.
What a great tutorial and script. Saved me sooo much time on my rebuild compared to my first implementation.
The only thing I’m having an issue with is the USB device config.
I’ve config’d the proxmox vm as you did for USB vendor/Device ID and rebooted.
HAS does auto discover the Conbee II and I can see it in integrations but when I try to configure it I get an error “Failed to probe the usb device” then it disappears from the integrations page until I reboot and it’s auto discovered again. I tried a few different ways, incl usb as a passthrough port but same error.
Any advice ?
Thanks
Gav
HAS 2023.4.4
Proxmox 7.3-6
Hello,
Did the Conbee worked before? Seems like a firmware issues, have you tried flashing it with the latest firmware?
I had similar problems with a Sonoff ZBDongle-E which I fixed by flashing the latest firm.
Let me know.
It did work previously but it was a few yrs ago when I set it up.
Other research found there were problems with the conbee after a firmware update.
I did flash a few different firmware versions but no joy so I’ve now bought a SkyConnect and it’s chugging along nicely.
I have the same issue, the command does nothing. I tried to copy/paste and tried to type it… Any idea why it is not executing? I’m running it as a root user.
Are you sure you are pasting it correctly? If a letter or two is missing, it won’t do anything.
Use Shift + Insert to paste the script, I am saying it again: It is correct.
“UPDATE 29.03.2023: A pro tip for setting the disk cache option on HAOS to writethrough greatly lowers the chance of a corrupted database on Proxmox. Thanks Derek!”
How? LOL
Got it!
HAOS
– Hardware
– Hard Disk (double click to open option window)
– Cache dropdown
– Write through
Hello. First I want to say I appreciate the work you have done. I have just completed proxmox with the intent of learning virtualization and especially home assistant, and many other things. I started researching installing HA and found your guide which seems to make it easy.
However, I like others I have experienced the issue where using the command does nothing. There were no available updates on my fresh install (not sure if that’s weird or convenient)
At first I was like ‘well, lets make sure I can reach the outside world’ so I used traceroute (after getting irate that shell wouldn’t recognize tracert until I remembered I was using linux) and that was successful. I rebeooted the machine (step 1, just in case, right).
I copied and pasted the link several times, copied it to notepad to make sure there are no extra spaces at the beginning or end, and typed it carefully several times and am still experiencing the issue others have had where the command does nothing.
I’m sure your script does work in 99 percent of the cases and don’t expect you to cater to me (especially because you are doing this out of the kindness of your heart and to help people) but it does seem to be more than an isolated issue. Do you have any suggestions to any configuration issues that may be causing a few of us to experience difficulties?
Either way, thank you for your contributions, I am excited to start the fun!
Okay, this is such a well-written comment that I would to thank you for providing your feedback.
The shell command has been working without issues for me, BUT there might really be something going on since so many people reported it. I will dig deeper and post a video tommorow of EXACTLY the steps I take to install the VM using the script.
Cheers
Thank you! In reading through your instructions to set up HA I skipped the ProxMox install as I already had it installed. I went back and read and the only difference in my install is I used a fake FQDN as that’s what the install suggested. I don’t know if that will affect this situation, but wanted to give you any info I have.
Your traceroute worked? I’m not sure if that’s what you said. (Forget how to traceroute in Linux.)
It wasn’t working for me either. I ran it several times and thought it was to work silently. LOL.
After a few hours I came back to check and no change. Then I decided to ping something. I found out that internet wasn’t working. Fixed that and ran the script again.
IT WAS A THING OF BEAUTY!
Thanks!!!
You have NO IDEA how much pain you saved me!
My Traceroute did work (On linux its traceroute, on Windows its Tracert). My trace route did work and I still am having the same issue, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m having some sort of connection issue to the outside because I do get an error trying to find the Debian repositories, but it’s weird that I can ping, trace route and still get nothing.
To anyone saying the script does nothing: It’s almost certainly a connection issue, double check your internet connection.
https://imgur.com/a/oB3HceJ
I’ve racked my brain all day at work, and then I had an epiphany and I solved my issue (and I think everyone elses issue) with the script not working. I still had the 127.0.0.1 which was the default example for the DNS- I only ever pinged and traced the DNS, but never tried a domain. I switched my DNS to the google 8.8.8.8 and sure enough, the script worked.
Not bad for a car salesman who just dabbles in computers for fun, right?
Awesome, just upgraded from Virtualbox running on a windows 10 PC with a script to auto start that was having issues after an internet outage requiring the host to be rebooted to regain access. TY TY!