In this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to set up Home Assistant on Proxmox so that you can get your own smart home running on Proxmox. There are technically two different ways to install Home Assistant, and we’re going to look at both below.
The first way to is automated, meaning that you run a script and it will walk you through the different options that you can use. This is incredibly easy, however, many people don’t feel comfortable running scripts, so we’ll look at how to manually install it as well.
How to Install Home Assistant on Proxmox
The steps below will walk you through the process of installing Home Assistant.
1. Make sure you have Proxmox installed and configured, then navigate to the Home Assistant downloads page and download the KVM/Proxmox (.qcow2) file.
2. Extract the file, then rename it from .qcow2 to .img on your Mac/PC. This step is important because our goal is to upload it to our ISO images library, then import it into our virtual machine and the ISOs directory doesn’t traditionally store .qcow2 images.
3. After you rename the file, upload it to your ISO Images location.
4. Select Create VM and then enter a name.
5. In the OS tab, select do not use any media.
6. In the System tab, check off QEMU Agent.
7. In the Disks tab, delete (red trash can) the scsi0 disk. You shouldn’t have any disks listed after doing this.
7. Set the CPU tab to use two cores.
8. Set the Memory to use 4GB.
9. Navigate to the Confirm tab and ensure that Start After Created is NOT selected. Then select finish to create the virtual machine.
10. Run the command below substituting the current version, VM ID, and Storage Location. After running the command below, the disk will be imported into your VM!
NOTE: If you’re using a separate location for your ISOs like a Synology NAS, you’ll have to navigate to that storage location. Once again, you might have to update the version below to match what you downloaded.
qm importdisk <VMID> /var/lib/vz/template/iso/haos_ova-8.4.img <STORAGE_LOCATION>
11. Select the virtual machine and edit the unused disk that we just imported.
12. Select Add to add the disk to the VM.
13. Next, select Add and then EFI Disk. Select your EFI Storage, uncheck pre-enroll keys, then select OK.
14. Finally (for the hardware changes), select Edit on the BIOS and set it as OMVF (UEFI).
15. Select Options, then Edit the boot order.
16. Uncheck ide2 and net0 and then check scsi0. Select OK to save these settings.
16. You can now start the virtual machine! It will take a little while to boot up the first time.
17. Once it finishes booting, you can open the console window for the VM and view the IP address that was assigned or access Home Assistant by the Home Assistant URL. After connecting to the URL, you’ll have to finish setting up Home Assistant, but it will be ready to go afterward!
There are multiple USB devices that people generally like to pass through to the Proxmox VM, and if you have one of them, follow this tutorial to add the USB device to this newly created VM.
Optional Additions to Home Assistant
These are a few things you can do to increase the overall functionality of Home Assistant.
Installing HACS (Home Assistant Community Store)
HACS will unleash the true power of Home Assistant so that you can install various other packages through HACS.
I would strongly urge you to follow these steps to install HACS which will help unleash more power.
Backing Up the HAOS Virtual Machine
Now that we’ve set up Home Assitant on Proxmox, you can easily back up your entire virtual machine. This has saved me countless times and I’d really recommend that you configure backups.
To configure backups, you can back up your HA VM to an external storage location, or you can utilize Proxmox Backup Server. Either way, you’ll be able to restore the VM if you ever need to!
Conclusion & Final Thoughts on Configuring HA on Proxmox
The two options above will have the exact same end result, meaning that Home Assistant will be installed and you’ll be able to use the supervised version.
However, the way that you go about them is entirely different. Depending on if you’re comfortable running scripts on your Proxmox server, that will probably determine if you’d like to use the first option. Please be aware that if the Proxmox host reboots, your VM will be inaccessible.
