Over the last year or so, I've come to rely on both Home Assistant and Proxmox quite a bit. Home Assistant unlocked possibilities I didn't know I had with my smart home, and made it much easier to manage all of it. Initially, I had Home Assistant on a bare metal install, but then I realized I could be doing so much more with the computer that powered it.

Proxmox truly changed the game because not only can I run Home Assistant with its full capabilities, but it lets me run a lot more tools as well. What used to be just a hub for controlling my smart home has become the most useful computer in my home, and I love it.

Home Assistant in Proxmox works perfectly

Migrating was easy

Running Home Assistant in Proxmox versus a bare metal install has some pretty notable advantages. For one thing, you don't have to waste resources on it. Home Assistant is a fairly lightweight service at the end of the day, so a bare metal install makes it a little overkill on most modern hardware. It definitely doesn't need more than four cores or 8GB of RAM. In Proxmox, I set it to run on just two cores and 4GB of RAM, and even that appears to be fairly generous based on the typical usage I see on my dashboard.

But flexibility is another big advantage here. If I want to change the resources alllocated to Home Assistant, I have that option by just configuring the virtual machine in Proxmox and tailoring it to my needs. And not only that, Home Assistant in Proxmox lets you choose between running the full operating system in a VM, or a more limited set of features using a container, which is a more lightweight approach.

That flexibility also allowed me to move my setup over keep everything as I had it. Before switching over to Proxmox, I was able to back up my Home Assistant configuration and then restore it in the VM relatively easily, whereas using the container may have made this impossible because I use some features that the containerized version doesn't support.

But I can do so much more in Proxmox

This is a NAS and much more

What really seals the deal for Proxmox, though, is everything else my PC can become in addition to a Home Assistant hub. On the surface, I only run three services in total on my Proxmox instance, but even then, there's some nuance to this.

Those two services are TrueNAS and Jellyfin, but TrueNAS is the only one that can access the extra HDD in my computer for storage, so in order for Jellyfin to work, I was able to set up an SMB share in TrueNAS that Jellyfin can then access for its storage. These two services live on the same computer, but while they're separated, they can communicate with each other in this way.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what I could do with Proxmox. It's a virtualization environment, so really, you could virtualize almost everything in it. I could create a VM and run Windows inside it, and have a Windows install always accessible from any of my devices by connecting to my Proxmox server. And there are numerous other VMs or containers I could set up for all kinds of things, including Waydroid (an Android experience using an LXC container) or self-hosted services like a Firewall, VPN, or DNS server like Pi-hole.

TrueNAS is an ecosystem in itself

All my services live there

While I could run a lot of services on Proxmox directly (and possibly with better performance), the way I've unlocked the potential of my homelab is actually through the TrueNAS VM that lives in my Proxmox host. TrueNAS as a platform makes it very easy to find and set up various self-hosted services, so when there's something I need, that's usually the route I take for setting things up, especially if some of these services also need access to large amounts of storage.

In fact, my Jellyfin container also used to be in my TrueNAS VM, but I wasn't able to properly leverage GPU acceleration for transcoding this way, which is why I changed it to ruin directly under Proxmox. But other services are still on my TrueNAS instance, with the two biggest ones being Nextcloud and Immich, which need to use my HDD for storing all my files. These are two essential services that allow me to keep all my important files and photos in dedicated storage and access them from any device.

I also run other services in TrueNAS, such as Miniflux to provide an RSS feed reader, Vaultwarden to manage my passwords, and Tailscale and Nginx Proxy Manager to allow me to access these services remotely from outside the home. I've even set up a retro gaming emulator with RetroAssembly.

The reason I do it this way is mostly convenience and ease of use. While you can find community scripts and guides to help you set up all kinds of services directly in Proxmox, TrueNAS has an app hub that makes it easy to find most of the services you'd want, and you can use something like Dockge to perform a one-click set up using just a compose file. The process is a little more complicated in Proxmox, at least based on my usage habits, but realistically, there isn't much I do in TrueNAS that I couldn't do in Proxmox directly if I wanted to.

My Proxmox home lab is fantastic

Regardless of whether my services live directly in Proxmox or in TrueNAS under it, it's all still powered by the same platform at its core, and it's incredible that a single platform can be home to so many useful tools. Proxmox allowed my to change my backup strategy and ditch typical cloud storage services, it made it easier to consume the movies and TV shows I own, and it allows me to manage my smart home more consistently than ever. Proxmox is a game-changer.