How to Run Home Assistant in Proxmox

Home Assistant has become the go-to platform for UK home automation enthusiasts — whether you’re managing a Hive heating system, controlling Philips Hue lighting, or keeping a close eye on energy consumption with smart plugs and a clamp meter. With energy costs remaining a major concern for UK households, having a reliable, always-on automation hub is no longer a hobbyist luxury but a practical tool for cutting bills. Traditionally, a Raspberry Pi has been the default hardware choice, but running Home Assistant OS (HAOS) inside a Proxmox virtual machine offers a far more robust setup: enterprise-grade snapshotting, easy backups, the ability to run other virtual machines alongside it, and no more corrupted SD cards. This guide walks you through getting HAOS running on Proxmox, step by step.

Why Proxmox Instead of a Raspberry Pi?

A Raspberry Pi is cheap and convenient, but it has real limitations. SD cards fail silently, USB power can be unstable, and taking a proper backup requires third-party tools and discipline. Proxmox, by contrast, runs on any x86 server or repurposed desktop, gives you one-click snapshots before every update, and lets you restore your entire Home Assistant environment in seconds if something goes wrong. You can also run other VMs on the same machine — a Pi-hole, a local DNS resolver, a NAS application — without any additional hardware.

Two Methods at a Glance

There are two ways to get HAOS running on Proxmox. The first is the community helper script by tteck, available at tteck.github.io/Proxmox. This is the fastest route — a single command run in the Proxmox shell creates and configures the VM automatically. It is well maintained and widely trusted, but it does abstract away the details. The second is the manual method, importing the official HAOS qcow2 image from the Home Assistant GitHub releases page. This is the approach covered in detail below, as it gives you full visibility and control over every setting.

Recommended VM Specifications

Before creating the VM, note the recommended minimum specifications. These give HAOS enough headroom to run integrations, automations, and add-ons without throttling:

• CPU: 2 cores
• RAM: 4 GB
• Disk: 32 GB (expandable later)
• BIOS: OVMF (UEFI) — required for HAOS
• Network: VirtIO (paravirtualised) for best performance

Step-by-Step: Manual HAOS Installation

1. Download the HAOS qcow2 image. Open a browser and go to the Home Assistant GitHub releases page (github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases). Find the latest stable release and download the file ending in .qcow2.xz — this is the KVM/QEMU image. Transfer it to your Proxmox host using SCP or download it directly on the host with wget. Extract the archive: xz -d haos_ova-*.qcow2.xz.
2. Create a new VM in Proxmox. In the Proxmox web UI, click Create VM. Assign a VM ID and a name (e.g., home-assistant). On the OS tab, select Do not use any media. On the System tab, set the BIOS to OVMF (UEFI) and add an EFI disk when prompted — store it on your local storage. Set Machine to q35. On the Disks tab, you can delete the default disk — it will be replaced by the imported image. Set CPU to 2 cores and RAM to 4096 MB. For Network, select VirtIO (paravirt). Complete the wizard but do not start the VM yet.
3. Import the disk image. In the Proxmox shell, run the import command, replacing 101 with your VM ID and local-lvm with your target storage:

   qm importdisk 101 /path/to/haos_ova-*.qcow2 local-lvm

   Proxmox will import the disk and report the new disk name (e.g., vm-101-disk-1).

4. Attach and configure the disk. Go to the VM’s Hardware tab. You will see an Unused Disk entry. Double-click it, set the Bus to SATA (HAOS requires SATA, not SCSI), and click Add. The disk is now attached.
5. Set the boot order. Go to Options > Boot Order. Enable the SATA disk you just attached and move it to the top of the boot list. Disable any other boot devices that are not needed.
6. Start the VM. Click Start. Open the console. HAOS will boot and begin its first-run preparation, which takes a minute or two. Once complete, the console will display the local IP address and confirm Home Assistant is running.
7. Access the web interface. On any device on the same network, open a browser and navigate to http://homeassistant.local:8123. If mDNS is not resolving on your network, use the IP address shown in the Proxmox console directly: http://<IP>:8123. Follow the onboarding wizard to create your user account and begin adding integrations.

Passing Through USB Devices

Many UK automation setups rely on a USB stick for Zigbee or Z-Wave — common examples include the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus and the Aeotec Z-Stick. To pass one of these through to the VM, shut the VM down first. In the Hardware tab, click Add > USB Device. Select Use USB Vendor/Device ID and pick your dongle from the list. Start the VM — Home Assistant will detect the stick and it will appear as an option when setting up the Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA integration.

Snapshots and Backups

One of the biggest advantages of Proxmox is snapshotting. Before every Home Assistant update, take a snapshot: go to the VM’s Snapshots tab, click Take Snapshot, and give it a descriptive name such as pre-update-2026-05-03. If the update introduces a breaking change or a buggy integration, you can roll back to the snapshot in seconds — no reinstalling, no restoring from a config backup. For longer-term resilience, also enable the built-in Home Assistant backup feature (Settings > System > Backups) to store compressed backups to a network share or cloud storage.

Updating Home Assistant

When a new HAOS update is available, Home Assistant will notify you via the dashboard. Before clicking update, take a Proxmox snapshot as described above. Then proceed with the update from within the Home Assistant UI. If everything looks good after the update, you can delete the snapshot to reclaim disk space. This combination of in-app updates and hypervisor-level snapshots makes Home Assistant on Proxmox far safer to maintain than any SD card-based setup, and gives UK households running critical automations — heating schedules, energy tariff switching, alarm integrations — the confidence to keep their system current without risk of downtime.