U5 / 3 guides

Hypervisors and platforms

Proxmox VE and Home Assistant OS, installed in nested virtual machines. Useful for what they cost at idle and how they behave, and clearly labeled where a nested setup cannot stand in for real hardware.

Line drawing: a large server unit whose open lid reveals smaller nested virtual machines stacked inside it like nested boxes.

2026-11-0218.4Home Assistant OS vs Container: boot, RAM and diskHome Assistant OS 18.4 booted to the onboarding API in 88 s in a nested 2 vCPU, 2 GB KVM guest and used a median of 659 MiB inside the guest (QEMU's resident size on the lab VM was 2,118 MiB), against 346 MiB and 5 s for Home Assistant Container 2026.10.4 in Docker; the OS time is a single first boot and both are single runs. Running the OS means running a whole VM (the guest's disk file grew to 5.62 GiB after first boot, for a cause the test did not examine); the benefit, per the official docs, is apps, which Container installations do not have. No Zigbee, Z-Wave or Bluetooth hardware was tested.
2026-11-029.2.24Install Proxmox VE 9 on Debian 13: timed steps and RAMFollowing the official wiki page, Proxmox VE 9.2.24 installed on Debian 13 in 5 min 48 s of script time in a 4 vCPU, 6 GB VM, 3 min 30 s of it for the proxmox-ve package install. It idled at 1,496 MiB of RAM and used 5.4 GB of disk. After the wiki's last step, apt update failed with HTTP 401 from the enterprise repository, which the wiki says the install sets up automatically.
2026-11-029.2.24Proxmox LXC vs KVM guest: create, boot and RAM for nginxFor the same nginx page on a nested Proxmox VE 9.2.24, the LXC container created in 2.5 s and answered HTTP 200 3.2 s after start, with 100 MiB charged to its cgroup (page cache included; the host's free -m used column moved by -8 MiB). The KVM guest created in 2.2 s but needed 12.0 s to answer and QEMU held 291 MiB (host free -m +263 MiB). Because the Proxmox host was itself a VM, use these as a comparison between the two, not as absolute numbers.