Proxmox VE is a free, open-source Type-1 hypervisor that turns a spare PC into a proper homelab server — one box running Home Assistant, a NAS, a Pi-hole, and half a dozen other services, each fully isolated in its own virtual machine or container. For UK smart home enthusiasts who've outgrown a single Raspberry Pi, a Proxmox home server setup is the natural next step: more headroom, easier backups, and the ability to run Home Assistant OS in a VM alongside everything else. Here's how to plan the hardware, install Proxmox, and get Home Assistant running on it.
What Proxmox VE actually is
Proxmox VE sits directly on the hardware, not on top of another OS. Unlike running virtual machines inside Windows or Ubuntu, Proxmox installs as the base operating system itself (a "Type-1" or "bare-metal" hypervisor built on Debian), giving each VM near-native access to CPU and memory. It's developed by Austrian company Proxmox Server Solutions and is genuinely free and open-source — there's an optional paid subscription for enterprise support and access to the "stable" update repository, but the community edition is fully functional with no feature restrictions.
The appeal for a homelab is consolidation. Instead of a pile of single-purpose Raspberry Pis, you run one physical server hosting several isolated guests: a Home Assistant instance, a network-attached storage share, a Pi-hole DNS filter, maybe a media server — each in its own VM or lightweight LXC container, with independent snapshots and backups.
Hardware requirements
Proxmox itself is undemanding, but plan for what you'll run on top of it. Proxmox's official documentation lists the requirements as:
- CPU: a 64-bit Intel or AMD processor with the Intel VT-x or AMD-V virtualisation flag (essential — check this before buying anything second-hand); VT-d/AMD-Vi is needed if you plan to pass through a PCIe device or USB controller directly to a VM.
- RAM: Proxmox recommends at least 2GB for the hypervisor and its own services, on top of whatever you allocate to guest VMs; if you use ZFS or Ceph storage, budget roughly an extra 1GB of RAM per TB of storage.
- Storage: fast SSDs are recommended over spinning disks, ideally with hardware RAID (with a battery-backed cache) or ZFS for redundancy.
- Network: a single gigabit NIC is the bare minimum; redundant NICs are recommended for anything beyond a test box.
For pure testing, Proxmox will run on a 64-bit CPU with virtualisation support, 1GB of RAM, a single hard drive and a single NIC — but that's not a realistic baseline for a server also running Home Assistant plus other guests. In practice, most UK homelabbers use a small-form-factor mini PC (an old Intel NUC or similar) or a repurposed office desktop, typically in the £150–£400 range for something with 16GB+ RAM and an SSD (prices vary by retailer and whether you buy new or refurbished). A used business desktop with a Core i5 and 16GB RAM is more than enough to run Proxmox, a Home Assistant OS VM, and two or three lighter containers comfortably.
Installing Proxmox VE
Installation runs from a bootable USB, much like installing any Linux distribution. Download the current Proxmox VE ISO from the official proxmox.com downloads page, write it to a USB stick, and boot the target machine from it. The graphical installer partitions the disk, sets up networking, and installs the base Debian-based system — a straightforward wizard for anyone who's installed Ubuntu or similar before. Once complete, everything else is managed from Proxmox's web UI (reachable at `https://
After installation, most guides recommend switching the update repository from the enterprise (paid) source to the free "no-subscription" repository so `apt update` works without a licence key — this is a config file edit, not a separate download, and it's how most home users run Proxmox indefinitely.
Running Home Assistant OS as a VM
Home Assistant officially lists Proxmox as a supported way to run Home Assistant OS. Home Assistant's own installation documentation treats Proxmox as a first-class KVM target alongside VirtualBox and VMware, and provides a ready-made `.qcow2` disk image built specifically for KVM/Proxmox rather than requiring a from-scratch OS install. The official minimum resource allocation for the Home Assistant OS VM is 2GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, with the note that you can increase both later as your automations and add-ons grow — in practice, most homelabbers give it 4GB RAM and a 32GB+ virtual disk from the start to leave headroom for the Supervisor, add-ons and database growth.
Running Home Assistant OS this way (rather than the Docker container install) keeps full Supervisor support — add-ons, automatic OS updates and the built-in backup system all work exactly as they would on a dedicated Home Assistant Green box, just running as a guest alongside your other services instead of on its own hardware.
Passing through a Zigbee or Z-Wave USB stick
A Home Assistant VM needs direct access to your radio dongle, not just a generic "USB device." Proxmox's official VM configuration documentation supports USB passthrough by vendor and product ID (format `vendorid:productid`) via the `qm set` command, for example: `qm set
Backups and snapshots
Built-in backups are one of the strongest arguments for Proxmox over a single-purpose Pi. Proxmox includes an integrated backup tool (vzdump) that can run scheduled, automated backups of entire VMs and containers — configuration and data together — with a choice of snapshot, suspend, or stop modes depending on how much downtime you can tolerate. Retention is configurable (for example, keeping the last 3 backups plus 13 daily and several yearly copies), and backups can be stored locally, on network storage, or on a dedicated Proxmox Backup Server. Combined with Home Assistant's own built-in backup and restore feature inside the Supervisor, running Home Assistant as a Proxmox VM effectively gives you two independent layers of backup — the VM-level snapshot and the HA-level backup — which is difficult to replicate on bare-metal Raspberry Pi installs.
Is Proxmox worth it over a Raspberry Pi or NAS?
Proxmox makes most sense once you're running more than one always-on service. If Home Assistant is genuinely the only thing you plan to run, a dedicated device like a simple home server or a Raspberry Pi with attached storage is simpler to set up and cheaper to buy. Proxmox earns its keep when you want Home Assistant, network storage, ad-blocking, a media server and maybe a few self-hosted apps all running reliably on one machine, with proper isolation between them and centralised backups for the lot. It's a bigger initial time investment than flashing an SD card, but for a genuinely multi-service homelab it pays that time back quickly.
