Home Assistant: Proxmox VE 8.0 Quick Start Guide

Hot off the press is Proxmox VE 8.0, which GA’d on June 22, 2023. It is based on Debian Bookworm, and has a number of new features like defaulting to Linux Kernel 6.2. This post is a completely refreshed version of my popular Home Assistant: Proxmox VE 7.4 Quick Start Guide, but all new for Proxmox VE 8.0.

Just like my 7.4 guide, this posts covers installing Home Assistant OS (HAOS). HAOS is, IMHO, the preferred method to run Home Assistant for the large majority of people. There are other installation flavors, such as supervised or container, but those are out of scope for this post. HAOS makes Home Assistant as turn-key as possible.

Proxmox VE 8.0 has a new text based fall-back installation UI, which can be very helpful for working around issues with newer CPUs. I did run into GUI installation issues with Proxmox VE 7.4 on my Intel 12th Generation CPUs, so this enhancement is very welcome. We will use the new console install method in this updated post.

If you are already running Proxmox VE 7.4 and want to upgrade, check out my guide:

How-to: Proxmox VE 7.4 to 8.0 Upgrade

What's covered in this guide?

This guide walks you through a bare metal installation of Proxmox, followed by deploying a Home Assistant OS (HAOS) VM. To be more specific I cover:

Why Proxmox VE for Home Assistant?
Proxmox Storage Recommendations
Creating Proxmox USB Boot Media
Installing Proxmox VE 8
Proxmox Post-Install Configuration
Intel Microcode Update (Optional)
Installing Home Assistant OS (HAOS) VM
Setting Static IP Address (Recommended)
Blocked DNS over HTTPS Workaround
USB Passthrough to HAOS (Optional)
Optimize CPU Power (Optional)
Check SMART Monitoring (Optional)
VLAN Enable Proxmox (Optional)
Proxmox Let’s Encrypt SSL Cert (Optional)

Why Proxmox VE for Home Assistant?

First, why would you run Home Assistant OS as a VM on Proxmox VE 8? Well, Home Assistant is typically not very resource hungry and even old mini-PCs from several years ago would have a lot of left over computing resources that you can run other services. Running Proxmox VE, which is a free hypervisor based on KVM, has a nice management UI and is pretty easy to use. It allows you to run HAOS in a VM, and you can then run other VMs or LXC containers on the same hardware.

If you are new to Home Assistant, not super nerdy, and just want a super reliable and easy to use “appliance”, then don’t go the Proxmox VE route. Just grab a cheap used mini/ultra-mini PC and run Home Assistant OS on it “bare metal” and be done with it. But if you know you want HAOS as a VM, potentially do LXC containers down the road, Proxmox VE is a great (and free) option. Even though Home Assistant can do backups, being able to do a whole HAOS VM snapshot at the hypervisor level can be great for roll-back from failed upgrades or “oh crap” mistakes.

The process covered in this post uses the awesome tteck Proxmox scripts. This makes the process super easy, grabs the latest version of HAOS, and enables GUI-driven advanced customizations. He’s updated his scripts to be compatible with Proxmox VE 8.0.

Proxmox Storage Recommendations

Proxmox is designed to be used on everything from an old PC to high-end enterprise production environments. There is certainly some debate on what type of storage configuration you should use. For example, should I use ZFS? Should I use multiple physical storage devices and use ZFS mirroring? Do I need a separate boot drive? Separate log and cache drives?

Those are all valid questions to ask in an enterprise production environment. However, for a home environment my thinking is KISS (keep it simple stupid), unless you REALLY know what you are doing. Why overly complicate your configuration for a home server?

For a home environment where you have a NAS (such as Synology, QNAP, etc.) I would suggest:

Use a single SSD/NVMe (likely M.2) drive in your Proxmox server. Make sure it’s large enough for future growth.
Use the EXT4 (default) filesystem with LVM-thin (also default)
Use Proxmox’s built-in backup to do nightly backups of all VMs and LXC containers to your NAS
Use Home Assistant’s Google Drive backup add-on to do nightly backups to the cloud
Configure Home Assistant 2023.6 (and later) to backup directly to your NAS

For more information about Home Assistant Backups and Restores, check out my posts:

Home Assistant: Ultimate Backup Guide
Home Assistant: Ultimate Restore Guide

Super nerds may want to deviate from using a single drive in their Proxmox server and throw in ZFS, do ZFS mirroring, and use multiple storage devices. More power to them if that’s what they want. But for the vast majority of Home Assistant users, a single drive with robust backup is more than sufficient.

Do NOT try and mount NAS storage to the Proxmox host and use that for VM or LXC storage. Always build your VMs or LXCs on local Proxmox storage, or risk running into significant issues.

Creating Proxmox USB Boot Media

In order to install Proxmox on your server, we need to create a bootable USB drive. This is super easy and you can use your favorite tool like Balena Etcher (Mac/PC/Linux). The Proxmox VE installer ISO is very small, at just a bit over 1GB, so your boot media need not be large.

Download the latest “Proxmox VE 8.0 ISO Installer” (I’ll be using 8.0-2)
Download and install Balena Etcher
Insert your USB boot media
Launch Balena Etcher and select Flash from file

5. Locate the Proxmox VE ISO you downloaded
6. Click on Select target and select your USB boot media

7. Click on Flash to write the image to the boot media. On a Mac you may be prompted for your password.
8. Wait a minute or so for the image to be written and verified.

9. After the image is written close Balena Etcher and remove your USB boot media. On a Mac it is automatically safely dismounted so just pull it out.

Installing Proxmox VE 8.0

Connect a keyboard and monitor to your Proxmox server/mini-pc/NUC/etc.
Power off your server and insert the USB boot media
Power on your server and press the right key to enter your BIOS setup (varies by manufacturer)
Depending on what OS you were previously running, a few settings might need to be tweaked. The name of these settings and menu location varies by BIOS manufacturer. Review the following settings:

Enable Virtualization (may be called VT-x, AMD-V, SVM, etc.)
Enable Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU (Future proofing for PCIe/GPU passthrough)
Leave UEFI boot enabled
Enable auto-power on (Ensures host will power on after a power interruption)
- This setting can be hard to find, have non-obvious names (e.g. setting State after G3 to S0 State), or not exist at all. Varies by manufacturer.
If you think down the road you might add a PCIe card (like a m.2 Google Coral TPU), make sure you look through the BIOS settings and DISABLE any PCIe power management (ASPM) options you find.
Change the boot order to set your USB boot media at the top

5. Save the BIOS settings and reboot. If all goes well, Proxmox VE 8.0 installer will start up.

Note: New to Proxmox VE 8.0 is a console installation option. This will gather all the required information for the install, except without using the graphics card. Why can this be helpful? On a lot of newer generation CPUs (like Intel 12th Gen and later), the graphical install would fail to start due to GPU compatibility with the Linux graphics server. There were convoluted workarounds. For this reason, I’ll walk you through the new console install method as it should be compatible with even the latest CPUs. I see no reason to use the Graphical version, as the console installer is fully featured and won’t have any GPU compatibility issues.

6. Arrow down to Install Proxmox VE (Console).
7. Press enter on I agree on the EULA
8. Select the Target harddisk and press enter on Next.

Note: Don’t change the filesystem unless you know what you are doing and want to use ZFS, Btrfs or xfs. The default is EXT4 with LVM-thin, which is what we will be using.

9. Select your Country, Time zone and Keyboard Layout.

10. Enter a strong password and an email address

11. Select your Management Interface, Hostname, IP address, Gateway and DNS Server.

Note 1: If your server is plugged into the network it should grab a DHCP address and populate the other information. I strongly recommend either using a static IP, or create a DHCP reservation for this server. You don’t want the IP to change on you.

Note 2: Put some thought into the Proxmox hostname you want to use. YOU CAN’T change this later or Proxmox will have serious (likely unrecoverable) problems. I’d use something generic like proxmox1.

12. Triple check everything on the Summary screen is correct then select Install.

Proxmox Post Install Configuration

Before we install Home Assistant, we need to do a couple of configuration tasks. First, we need to update Proxmox with the latest packages. Please note you MUST run the post-configuration script before you do any Proxmox updates or deploy HAOS. If not, you will likely see 401 errors with the enterprise repositories since you (likely) don’t have a Proxmox paid license.

Open a browser and navigate to the IP address and port 8006 (e.g. https://10.13.2.200:8006). Click through all your browser warnings and connect anyway.
Login with the root username the password you selected during the install process.
Note: You will get a subscription warning. We will fix that in a second. Acknowledge the warning.

3. In the left pane click on the hostname of your Proxmox server.
4. Click on Shell in the middle pane and paste in the following command to run the awesome tteck post install script:

				
					bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/misc/post-pve-install.sh)"

5. The tteck script will ask you a series of questions. Run the script and answer Y to all of the questions. Wait a few minutes for all of the updates to install.

6. When asked if you wish to reboot press enter on yes.

Intel Microcode Update (Optional)

Intel releases new microcode for their processors from time to time. This is different from BIOS firmware, as the Intel microcode runs inside the processor. It can fix CPU bugs or make other changes, as needed. If you are running on an Intel system you can use the following tteck script to download the latest Intel microcode and install it. A reboot will be needed for the microcode to take effect.

				
					bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/misc/microcode.sh)"

After the Proxmox host reboots you can run the following command to see if any microcode update is active. Not all CPUs need microcode updates, so you may well not see anything listed.

				
					journalctl -k --grep="microcode updated early to"

Installing Home Assistant OS (HAOS) VM

For the HAOS installation we will be using the awesome tteck Proxmox Helper Scripts.

Login to Proxmox and select your server in the left pane.
Click on Shell in the middle pane.
Enter the following command to start the HAOS install via the tteck Proxmox script.
Note: We will be using the advanced settings to optimize the configuration. The script automatically downloads the latest HAOS stable image, creates the Proxmox VM, and will configure the hardware and networking.

				
					bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"

4. Press Enter to proceed.

5. Select Advanced (NOT Yes).

6. For the version chose latest stable version. HAOS is regularly updated, so the screenshot may not reflect what you see.

7. Leave the default Virtual Machine ID.
8. Leave the default Machine Type.
9. Chose the Write Through Disk Cache (SUPER IMPORTANT) (arrow down then press space and then tab to ok).

Explanation: If you leave this as Default (which is “none” within Proxmox) then the HAOS filesystem or database(s) within HAOS can be corrupted during unexpected power loss to your server. Write through causes an fsync for each write. It’s the more secure cache mode, as you can’t lose data but it is also slower. In fact, Proxmox documentation gives you a warning for “None” (which is the Default): Warning: like writeback, you can lose data in case of a power failure.

10. Set the VM’s Hostname.
11. Change CPU Model to Host.

Explanation: If you have a standalone Proxmox host (i.e. no multi-node clustering with Live Migration), use Host mode for the CPU Model. The KVM64 model hides some instructions such as MMX, AVX or AES instructions. This can have a performance impact on the VM. Per QEMU documentation: This [Host mode] passes the host CPU model features, model, stepping, exactly to the guest. This is the recommended CPU to use, provided live migration is not required.

12. Chose your Core Count (2 is fine).
13. Chose your RAM (I’d recommend 4-6GB).
14. Leave the Bridge.
15. Leave the MAC Address.
16. Leave the VLAN.
17. Leave the MTU Size.
18. Select Yes to start VM after creation.
19. Select Yes on Advanced Settings Complete.
20. If prompted to select the storage use the space bar to select the desired disk then tab to Ok.

Note: I STRONGLY urge you to use local Proxmox storage (e.g., local-lvm), not storage backed by a NAS. If there’s a network hiccup or the NAS goes offline you could easily end up with a corrupted VM.

21. Wait for the installer to complete. This will take a few minutes.

22. Once the VM is created, click on it in the left pane and then select console in the middle pane. Note the IP address and port number (8123).

23. Open a browser and open a HTTP connection (http://IP:8123).
24. Depending on the speed of your server, you may see a Preparing Home Assistant screen for several minutes. Wait until you see Create Account screen.
25. On the Home Assistant account screen enter your name, username and password.

26. On the HA setup screen enter your name, username and password.
27. On the next screen click detect. The map should move to your approximate location. Use the +/1 and drag the map around until you locate your house. Getting this right is important for automations that depend on HA detecting if you are home or not.
28. Fill in the country, language, timezone, elevation and currency.
30. Click Next.

31. Select what, if any, analytics you went to send back to the Home Assistant mother ship. Click Next.

32. On the next screen HA will show you all of the devices and services that it found on your network. Do NOT set any of them up here. Just click Finish.

Setting Static IP Address (Recommended)

I would strongly recommend that HAOS be configured to use a static IP address. You can do this by either a DHCP reservation in your router, or set a static IP in the Home Assistant user interface.

In the left pane click on Settings -> System -> Network. Click on IPv4.
Change to Static and enter the details.
Change the address you are connecting to in your bowser and verify HA is using the new IP.

Blocked DNS over HTTPS Workaround

If you are blocking OUTBOUND DNS over HTTPS, then you might run into a HA bug where HA floods your firewall with TENS OF MILLIONS of DNS queries indefinitely. In order to work around this bug, we will install the SSH add-on and then modify the HA DNS configuration.

Click on your name in the lower left panel.
In the right pane enable Advanced Mode.
Click on Settings in the left pane, then Add-ons.
Click on Add-on store in the lower right
Search for “ssh” and select the Advanced SSH & Web Terminal. Click on it.
Click Install.
After it installs, click on Show in sidebar.
Click on Configuration at the top of the screen.
Enter the username and password that you configured on the initial HA setup screen. Click on Save.

10. Click on the Info tab at the top left of the screen.
11. Click on Start.
12. In the left pane in HA click on Terminal.
13. Run the following two commands:

				
					ha dns options --fallback=false
ha dns restart

14. Re-enable the DoH block rule on your firewall.
15. Monitor your network to verify your firewall is not being flooded with DNS requests.

USB Passthrough to HAOS (Optional)

If you have any USB dongles for radios such as z-wave, Zigbee, Thread, etc, we need to pass it through to the HAOS VM. This is optional, and not needed if you have no USB devices to passthrough. I am using the Home Assistant SkyConnect Zigbee/Thread/Matter USB dongle.

Connect your USB dongle to your server.
In the left pane click on your HAOS VM.
In the middle pane click Hardware.
Click on Add then USB Device.
Select Use USB Vendor/Device ID.
Chose the USB device to passthrough.

7. In the upper right hand corner of the VM pane click on the down arrow next to Shutdown and select Reboot.
8. Home Assistant will auto-discover the dongle after the reboot.

Optimize CPU Power (Optional)

Depending on your server hardware and how concerned you are about power consumption, you might want to tweak how Proxmox handles CPU scaling. I have a 12th Generation Alder Lake CPU (i5-1235U), which idles at 8w-10w according to a smart power plug.

Processors have different power governors, so run this command to see which ones are available to you:

				
					cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors

My processor lists performance and powersave options. Run the following commands to set the mode to powersave permanently. Change the GOVERNOR setting as needed for your processor and desired power mode.

				
					apt install cpufrequtils

cat << 'EOF' > /etc/default/cpufrequtils
GOVERNOR="powersave"
EOF

Check SMART Monitoring (Optional)

Proxmox should enable SMART disk monitoring by default. But it’s a good idea to check the SMART health stats to make sure your media isn’t having any issues. On rare occasions a motherboard may not support SMART, so it’s always best to check that it is working.

Check SMART Health:

In the left pane change to Server View. Click on your Proxmox host.
In the middle pane click on Disks.
In the right pane you should see your disk(s) and SMART status. You can click on the main disk device then click Show SMART values to further inspect the health.

VLAN Enable Proxmox (Optional)

Out of the box Proxmox is not VLAN aware. Even if you don’t need VLANs right now, you can still enable a check box to make Proxmox VLAN aware. Then down the road when you want to setup VLANs, it’s one less thing to remember to do and VLANs will just work.

To enable VLANs:

In the left pane change to Server View. Click on your Proxmox host.
In the middle pane click on Network (under system).
Click on Linux Bridge (vmbr0). Click on Edit.
Tick the box next to VLAN aware and click OK.

Tip: If you install other services on your Proxmox server like HomeBridge, Scrypted, etc. then turning on VLAN enable might cause an issue with IGMP snooping on your physical switches. This is not a guaranteed problem. I had to disable IGMP snooping on all of my physical switches or any Homekit/multi-cast services would not function. Turning off IGMP snooping on a small home network isn’t really a big deal. Another person I know had to do a switch firmware upgrade. Or you can try using AVAHI as the mDNS provider for any services like HomeBridge and Scrypted.

Proxmox Let's Encrypt SSL Cert (Optional)

If you want to secure Proxmox with a trusted SSL certificate and even add Proxmox as an iFrame to Home Assistant follow my post Proxmox Let’s Encrypt SSL: The Easy Button

Summary

You now have Home Assistant OS (HAOS) running on Proxmox VE 8.0! The whole process is pretty easy and with the tteck scripts, makes creating the HAOS VM a snap. Tteck has a bunch of other Proxmox scripts to setup a variety of VMs and LXC containers. Visually Proxmox VE 8.0 is pretty much the same as 7.4. However, the new console setup process bypasses any possible graphical install issues with newer generation GPUs. This is a welcomed change. Plus now that the Linux Kernel 6.2 is the default, makes the installation that much quicker and easier.

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Daniel

July 10, 2023 12:46 am

Hi
It worked great. Thank you so much for putting this together.

In my setup I have all my IoT in a segregated IoT VLAN. The Proxmox environment was installed in the main LAN. Following your instructions, Home Assistant was also installed in the main LAN. Is there a way to have Home Assistant installed in my IoT VLAN?

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Derek Seaman

July 23, 2023 5:00 pm

Reply to Daniel

Yes in Proxmox you can create different networks and assign a VM to that network.

doc

July 19, 2023 1:27 am

Post unstall help script uses PVE7 ONLY

July 23, 2023 4:59 pm

Reply to doc

No, tteck has updated it for 8.0.

Beppe

September 7, 2023 12:30 am

Reply to Derek Seaman

I’m unable to install the post install scritp. Every time I try, after the green lines it show a yellow one (like the screen) with also the login:
– Updating Proxmox VE (Patience)…root@pve:~#
It never gets to ask to reboot
Every night I get the error “Update package database”

Can anyone help me?

Cire

July 30, 2023 3:01 am

Hi Derek
When booting with pcie coral , I get infinite lines : pci 0000:03:00.0: AER Error of this Agent is reported first
Didnt have this error in Proxmox 7
Any idea if I can change something ?

August 16, 2023 5:40 am

Reply to Cire

Had to remove PCI card , install proxmox , ignore PCI device at boot , and then replug the PCI card. But in last couldnt get stable system , i had to go bare metal , and running fine now !

Adam

August 20, 2023 10:02 am

Thanks Derek, Helped a lot.

marco

September 1, 2023 8:06 am

i have running haso on proxmox 7.4
Is there anything that i need to know for HASO to upgrade to proxmox 8?

September 12, 2023 3:12 am

Reply to marco

No it’s seamless.