With a name like Home Assistant, you’d typically expect the application to remain restricted to smart devices and IoT products. And well, you’d probably be right, as most of the native tools on HASS are designed to support smart home environments alone. But thanks to a talented community of tinkerers, you can not only deploy additional self-hosted tools as apps (previously called add-ons), but also combine them with your Home Assistant configuration.

But the quickest way to turn your smart home hub into a behemoth all-in-one platform involves arming it with additional integrations from the Home Assistant Community Store. While there are dozens of cool HACS integrations out there, my favorite has to be the Proxmox VE integration by developer dougiteixeira. As someone with a largely Proxmox-centric home lab, it lets me monitor all my server nodes while helping me automate simple tasks without configuring complex Ansible and Terraform scripts.

The Proxmox VE integration meshes well with HASS dashboards

Perfect for monitoring virtual guests

If you’re a Home Assistant enthusiast, you’ve probably figured out that it’s possible to create multiple dashboards besides the default Overview tab. And considering all the statistics the Proxmox VE integration can pull into HASS, being able to create different dashboards is pretty helpful when you want to filter certain entities. Between the operational status and resource consumption metrics of the host, LXCs, and VMs, you can track all the essential statistics from your HASS UI. Throw in the highly-customizable nature of these dashboards, and you can design your ideal monitoring interface.

Better yet, you can even add clickable links to your virtual guest collection on the dashboard via the Interactions tab for the title card. I’ve configured my LXC status entities to open the web UIs of the services in a single click, while holding the card launches its Proxmox summary page. The Proxmox VE integration can identify cluster nodes, so you can pull the stats for the virtual guests hosted on either system and split them into different views to avoid overcrowding the main dashboard.

But the real fun begins when you bring automations into the fray

You can even combine Proxmox entities and smart devices

Considering that the Proxmox VE integration feeds all the stats of your PVE nodes and virtual guests into Home Assistant as entities, you could use them to design trigger-action automations, just like typical smart home paraphernalia. And I don’t just mean using your PVE node metrics as the trigger elements, either. Since the virtual guests and nodes are recognized as individual devices, you can also perform different actions on them, including shutting them down, spinning them up, or suspending them.

For example, I’ve designed a workflow that automatically starts my Linux Mint VM as soon as Home Assistant detects the Pop_OS! virtual machine booting up. The trigger entity for this workflow is the binary status sensor of the Pop_OS! VM, while the action device is the overarching Linux Mint virtual machine, not some sensor entity associated with it. I’ve created a couple of different automations along these lines, such as one that starts my Ollama LXC if another container that utilizes my LLMs boots up.

Heck, you can even perform operations on your actual Proxmox node using other smart devices. I’ve hooked my PVE workstation to a UPS, which is also connected to my Home Assistant hub. So, I designed an automation where the Proxmox node would shut down as soon as the UPS’ battery drops below 40%.

It's fairly easy to deploy, too

Remember to enable certain controls for your PVE entities

For an integration that opens doors to complex automations, the Proxmox VE package is fairly easy to install if you’ve already configured the Home Assistant Community Store on your HASS node. Once you’ve downloaded it from this link, you can configure it via the Add Integration option inside the Devices & Services tab of the Settings section. Then, you just need to enter the URL of your Proxmox node, its port number (which is 8006 in most cases), and the username and password associated with the account. I skipped the token entirely, since it caused connection issues on my cluster nodes, but I recommend creating a new user and restricting its privileges if you don’t want to accidentally break your PVE node with your Home Assistant experiments.

By default, the integration disables the start, reboot, shutdown, and other controls for your VM, LXC, and node devices. You could still use their resource consumption sensors as the trigger entities, but you’ll have to enable these controls inside the Devices section if you wish to use them as the “Then do” devices in your if-then automation chains.

Build a powerful smart home lab with the Proxmox VE integration

So far, I’ve only created simple automations for my PVE node. But since I’ve already paired my TrueNAS rig, Frigate hub, and Vikunja container with Home Assistant, I can’t wait to spend the next weekend building quirky automations (and maybe breaking a service or two in the process).