Here we are in the third installment of this series – Migrating Home Assistant from Pi to Proxmox. In today’s article, we are going to get the core of the ecosystem installed – Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) in a virtual machine running in Proxmox VE.
The HAOS is the foundation of our smart home, on top of which the other tools are built and integrated. We will get to MQTT, Zigbee2MQTT, Node Red and other luxuries – but first we need to build the foundation.
Installing Home Assistant on Proxmox shouldn’t be viewed as a simple software installation (although it really is). It is like constructing a new digital home for your smart ecosystem. We’re going to make sure that every brick is perfectly placed.
Installing HAOS VM - The easy way
While you could do this the hard way, deploying a VM, downloading the tools OS and etc. to manually deploy HAOS… why the hell would you?
The easiest way to install Home Assistant on Proxmox is by using the Helper-Scripts provided by TTeck’s Proxmox page. Specifically, we’ll use the Home Assistant OS VM script. This requires that you have access to the Proxmox web user interface https://<your proxmox server ip>:8006 and you can do it all from the comfort of your couch. Something I highly recommend 😇
Step 1: Accessing the Proxmox Terminal
Fire up your web browser and open the Proxmox UI that you installed and configured in the earlier guide. Once logged in, select your Proxmox server node in the left hand column, then find and select the >_Shell icon (see screenshot below). This will open a command prompt in your Proxmox server and you will copy (click to copy) and run the following command to execute the Home Assistant installation script:
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"
The script will prompt you with a few questions to setup and configure the Home Assistant VM. The first question is do you want to use the Default install, or Advanced Options … choose Advanced.
The next screen will ask what version of Home Assistant do you want to install. Unless you know what you are doing, or have a damn good reason to do otherwise, choose the latest stable version.
The next step is critical. For Disk Cache you really need to ensure that the default option Write Through is selected. I cant stress this enough. If you are not using this, and chose “None” you will lose data if there is a power failure or other error. Write Through forces a fsync for each write. Yes, it does impact performance, but to be completely honest its negligible in my experience, and the protection provided far outweighs the impact. You have been warned!
The next dialogs ask for a host name – give it anything you like. I used HAOS-VM for mine, but it will still show as “homeassistant.local” on the network … just give it a name that you will recognize and makes sense for you.
Next you’re asked to choose the Host Type. Unless you are using the commercial version with clustering, Live Migration tools, etc., just select Host mode. If you are using the commercial versions you probably know more than I do and choose what you think is best. For the rest of us using the Community Versions of Proxmox, go with Host and make your life easier and more fulfilling. 😅
The next sections are for configuring the “hardware” of your Home Assistant virtual machine. Here are my recommendations feel free to tweak them to your needs:
- CPU Cores: 2
- RAM: I used 12GB but you can probably use 8GB and be fine
- Network: Bridge (default)
- VLAN: (leave alone unless you know what you are doing)
- MTU Size: (again leave alone unless you have a good reason)
- Start VM after creation: Yes
- If you have multiple data disks you will be asked where to install the VM in Proxmox, select which you want to use
- And finally YES to create the VM with the supplied settings
Now go warm up your coffee or top off your favorite adult beverage and give it a couple minutes to do its thing.
You can confirm its all running as expected by navigating in the Proxmox UI to the VM container and opening the Console. If all went as expected you will see the following Home Assistant console in HAOS. (Note: the IP addressees, etc will differ based on your network, etc.).
Home Assistant is now installed ... next?
You now have an empty Home Assistant installation running on Proxmox waiting to take control of your home. Now the next steps will depend on if you are migrating an existing Home Assistant system, or starting from scratch.
These will be covered in the next article Home Assistant: Post Proxmox Install.
This is just the first part of a detailed series. The following articles will explore the migration process in depth, ensuring you have all the knowledge and tools at your disposal.
Articles in this Series:
- Migrating Home Assistant to Proxmox
- Proxmox: Installation & Configuration
- Proxmox with a Home Assistant VM ← You are HERE
- Home Assistant: Post Proxmox Install
- Extra Credit: Getting Zigbee2MQTT and other tools setup and integrated
There is also a "prequel" to this series: My Home Automation Journey.
