How to run Home Assistant on Proxmox

Running Home Assistant on Proxmox is the most flexible approach for a local-first smart home. You get full control over your automation hub, avoid cloud dependencies, and can run additional services alongside it. Here’s how to do it right.

Proxmox gives you the most flexibility for running Home Assistant alongside other smart home services. The Home Assistant Green (or the Home Assistant Yellow if you already own one; it was wound down for new sales in October 2025) is a simpler alternative if you want turnkey hardware, but Proxmox wins for control and expandability.

Why Proxmox makes sense

Proxmox VE is a free, open-source hypervisor that runs on bare metal. Compared with running Home Assistant OS directly on dedicated hardware, a Proxmox host lets you give Home Assistant a proper virtual machine and still keep headroom for other services. You can run multiple containers or VMs on the same hardware - think Home Assistant, a Zigbee2MQTT container, a network monitoring tool, and maybe a media server.

You do not give anything up inside Home Assistant by doing this. Running the official Home Assistant OS image as a virtual machine is a supported installation method, and it keeps the full Home Assistant OS experience: the add-on store, one-click updates, and the built-in backup tool all work exactly as they do on dedicated hardware. (This is not the old Supervised install on your own Debian host, which was deprecated in May 2025.) The tradeoff is that you now maintain the hypervisor as well: Proxmox host updates, VM sizing, and USB passthrough for your Zigbee or Z-Wave radio are all on you. For anyone who wants Home Assistant to share a box with other services, that is a fair trade.

Recommended hardware for a Proxmox Home Assistant host includes compact PCs like the Beelink EQ14 or Beelink SER6 MAX. These have enough CPU and RAM to run Home Assistant plus other services. (The Beelink EQ13 that used to lead this list is discontinued; the EQ14 is its N150 replacement.) The Intel NUC 12 Pro is another solid option, though it is discontinued and so a used-market buy (the ASUS NUC 15 Pro is the current equivalent); my roundup of the best mini PCs for Home Assistant compares more options side by side.

Setting up the Home Assistant VM

The easiest approach is downloading the official Home Assistant OS disk image and running it as a Proxmox VM. The Home Assistant documentation walks through this, but the basics are: download the .qcow2 image, decompress it, create a new VM in Proxmox, and import that image as the VM’s hard disk. It is a pre-installed disk image rather than an installer you boot from a CD drive, so there is no setup wizard: the VM boots straight into Home Assistant.

Assign at least 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM to start. If you plan to run many integrations or heavy automations, bump that to 8GB. Storage should be at least 32GB, though more is better for logs and addons.

Set the VM to start on boot so your smart home comes back online after power outages. Proxmox handles this automatically if you enable the “Start at boot” option in the VM settings.

Proxmox configuration essentials

You do not need to disable the Proxmox firewall, because it is already off. Proxmox VE ships the firewall disabled by default at the datacenter level and at the VM level, and on top of that every virtual network device carries its own enable flag, so a stock install is not filtering anything between your Home Assistant VM and the rest of your LAN. Leave it that way unless you have a specific reason to start restricting traffic.

Configure the network as a bridge mode so your VM gets an IP from your router’s DHCP server. This makes discovery easier and keeps things consistent with your other devices.

For storage, use Proxmox’s local storage or NFS if you have a NAS. Having enough disk space matters for the Home Assistant database, which grows over time. Monitor disk usage and clean up old data periodically. If you would rather run Home Assistant on a NAS instead of a dedicated Proxmox box, compare the platforms in Home Assistant on Synology vs Unraid vs TrueNAS.

Backups are not optional. Proxmox can backup the entire VM, but it is worth also using Home Assistant’s built-in backup to cloud storage or a local network location. Keep at least two recent backups, and see how to back up Home Assistant properly for a full 3-2-1 strategy, and how to restore a Home Assistant backup step by step for the recovery side.

Networking for local-first smart home

Your Home Assistant VM needs a stable address. Configure this in your router’s DHCP settings by reserving an IP address for the VM’s MAC address. This matters because everything that reaches Home Assistant by address breaks when the lease changes: the mobile app, a wall tablet showing a dashboard, a reverse proxy, and any network-attached device you have pointed at your instance. A USB Zigbee or Z-Wave stick is not the reason - it is passed through as a serial device and never has an IP address of its own.

If you’re adding hardware like a Zigbee USB dongle, pass it through to the VM using Proxmox’s USB passthrough. The SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (E) or ConBee III are common choices. USB passthrough gives Home Assistant direct access to the device.

For integrations requiring network discovery, make sure your router doesn’t isolate the Home Assistant device. Everything should be on the same broadcast domain.