I spent years running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. It worked. It was fine. But “fine” isn’t good enough when you’re trying to build something reliable, and that’s where Proxmox changed everything for me.
Most people talk about Home Assistant’s integrations—the obvious stuff like connecting your smart lights, thermostats, and cameras. Those are useful, sure. But what actually transformed my entire setup wasn’t adding more smart devices. It was rethinking the infrastructure underneath it all. Moving to Proxmox as my virtualization platform gave me the flexibility to run Home Assistant properly, alongside other services, without constant crashes or resource conflicts.
Let me walk you through what I learned and why this matters if you’re getting serious about home automation.
The Problem With My Old Setup
My Raspberry Pi was struggling. I had Home Assistant running on it, sure, but I also wanted to run other things—a local backup solution, a media server, some development environments for testing automations. Everything was fighting for the same limited CPU and RAM.
The real issue wasn’t any single problem. It was death by a thousand cuts. Home Assistant would lag when it tried to index my media library. Database queries would slow down automation execution. I’d lose connection to devices during backups. Nothing catastrophic happened often enough to justify rebuilding everything, but it happened often enough to be annoying.
I was also locked into whatever operating system came with the Pi. Upgrading Home Assistant meant hoping nothing broke. Running a different Python version for another project? Forget it. Everything was tangled together.
How Proxmox Fixed This
Proxmox is a hypervisor. Think of it as a platform that lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single piece of hardware, all isolated from each other. I set up an old desktop computer with decent specs—nothing fancy, just something with more power than a Pi—and installed Proxmox on it.
Now my setup looks completely different:
- One virtual machine dedicated entirely to Home Assistant
- Another VM for my backup solution
- A third for Docker containers running various other services
- Separate testing environments when I need to experiment
Each one runs independently. If Home Assistant needs a restart, nothing else shuts down. If I want to try a new integration that requires specific dependencies, I can test it in isolation without risking my production setup.
The performance improvement was immediate. Home Assistant no longer competes with other processes for resources. Database queries run faster. Automations execute reliably. I rarely see connection drops anymore.
The Real Win: Flexibility With Integrations
This is where the infrastructure actually enabled better Home Assistant usage. With Proxmox in place, I could finally experiment with the integrations that actually matter.
On my old Pi, I avoided anything resource-intensive. Adding a new integration meant calculating whether my system could handle it. Now I don’t worry about that. I’ve set up integrations that require local processing—things like object detection on camera feeds, complex scene automation, and detailed logging—without worrying I’ll crash my core system.
More importantly, I could run specialized VMs for specific tasks. I have a separate Home Assistant instance that runs experimental features and untested integrations. When it works, I migrate it to my main production VM. It’s a workflow that would have been impossible on a single-board computer.
Getting Started With Proxmox
I won’t pretend it’s trivial. You need hardware—a used desktop or server works fine, nothing cutting-edge required. You need to be comfortable with basic Linux and virtualization concepts. But if you’re already running Home Assistant, you’ve got the technical foundation.
The learning curve is real but manageable. Proxmox’s web interface is intuitive. Creating and managing VMs takes minutes once you understand the basics. Documentation is solid, and the community is helpful.
The payoff? A setup that actually scales with your needs. A system that’s resilient. The ability to experiment without fear of breaking production. That’s worth the effort.
If you’re serious about home automation and running Home Assistant, don’t just focus on which devices to integrate. Think about your infrastructure first. Everything else builds on top of that foundation. Proxmox gave me one that actually works.
Source: Home Assistant’s best integrations aren’t the obvious ones – here’s what actually changed my setup
Natalie Foster
Laura Bennett