Home Assistant is one of the best free and open-source applications out there, and it's easy to deploy and get set up for even the most basic of use cases. I dove head-first a few months ago into sensors, software integrations, and automation a few months ago, and there's been a lot to learn. Given that I had been running it in a container on TrueNAS for a long time, I finally decided to migrate it to a mini PC running Proxmox I have lying around.

The mini PC is the Ayaneo AM01, and is the first Proxmox host I configured. What started as an experiment in hypervisors has now turned into another enthusiast time sink, and I've been loving experimenting with it. Not only that, but I get the benefits of using Home Assistant OS too, with its automatic management of everything that I need. While I'm more than capable of using Docker and deploying my own add-ons, Home Assistant OS just works, and Proxmox enables me to do more, too.

Migrating Home Assistant to Home Assistant OS

The Ayaneo AM01 works perfectly for this

The setup process wasn't difficult at all, and I had my instance running in just a few minutes once I'd downloaded Home Assistant OS on my Proxmox host. It deploys like any other virtual machine, with the added benefit of consuming a lot less power than my NAS, and meaning that my experimentations on my NAS (that can result in crashing or a required reboot) won't impact any of my automations or access to other services.

While I restored my backup using Nabu Casa (Home Assistant Cloud), it can be just as easy to restore a backup yourself. Simply create a backup, download the backup file, and then upload it in the same place that you pulled the local backup on your new host, and it'll pull in everything for you, including your custom components. It just works, and I had everything set up rather quickly. Even my Zigbee dongle, a USB device, was easy to passthrough in Proxmox to the VM in a manner quite similar to TrueNAS. Find the device ID in /dev, and pass that value through, and your machine can see it instantly.

There are some aspects that I decided to configure manually though, just to have complete control. I at first elected to configure Zigbee2MQTT as a Home Assistant add-on, but I switched over to a Proxmox LXC, simply to separate services as much as possible. The same goes for my MQTT server, Mosquitto, again just to separate essential services. If I need to reboot the Home Assistant container, my Zigbee devices can still communicate and report data, which ensures that they maintain a consistent connection, and Home Assistant will just pull the latest data when it's back up.

Right now, the Ayaneo AM01 running Proxmox manages services relating to my home specifically, and I like having that degree of separation away from everything else. They're more "essential" services, and with the AM01 consuming less than 10W of power most of the time, it's a significant step-down from the 60-80W my TrueNAS machine can use at any given time. My long-term goal is to be able to turn off my primary home lab machine when I'm not using it, migrating essential services to my Proxmox host so that I can use features like Wake-on-LAN to switch on my home lab when I need it. I'll link this up with Home Assistant too, so that I can manage as much as possible through it.

Any old PC can run Proxmox

It's not particularly intense

The beauty of Proxmox is how lightweight it is, and as a hypervisor, you control the conditions all of your services run in. I have all of my essential home services running on the AM01, and everything just works. It uses very little power, it's silent, and it takes up very little space. It's a fantastically simple solution to ensuring that everything continues running as it should, and I get the benefits of having a fully managed operating system for Home Assistant, with everything that I could ever need inside of it.

I'm competent with the likes of Docker, but it's nice to not need to worry about trying to hook up individual services to achieve the same thing that an add-on can do. Plus, Home Assistant can integrate those into the UI itself, like in the case of the wonderful File Explorer add-on that adds a tab in the sidebar for accessing and modifying my files. That particular mini PC had just been sitting around in a drawer unused, so I figured it was a prime candidate for experimentation, and I'm so glad I did.

If you have any older devices, even an old laptop, it can be a prime candidate for testing out new software. Proxmox is just one of many you can try, and there are other options like the free version of ESXi or even just plain old Ubuntu server, too. I'm running many services across a multitude of devices at this point, and I'm trying to organize how I deploy them. So far, it's working out nicely!