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Proxmox and Home Assistant OS 18.0 Coverage
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XDA ☛ Proxmox on microSD cards is technically possible, but terrible transfer speeds aren’t the only problem
Despite relying on microSD cards during my time as a fledgling Raspberry Pi enthusiast, I’ve moved on to SSDs for my DIY projects. As a result, I’ve got numerous microSD cards left over from my early tinkering days, which I unfortunately uncovered during spring-cleaning a few weeks ago. One shower thought led to another, and I figured I could try testing their utility in a home lab environment. Following this insane train of thought led me to install Proxmox on a microSD card and configure virtual guests on it.
If this unhinged idea sounds intriguing, then here’s a log of what happened when I used my microSD cards for my PVE installation partition, lvm pool, and lvm-thin storage, and why you should avoid doing so if you value your Proxmox node’s health (and your sanity).
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XDA ☛ I ignored storage discipline in Proxmox until a restore actually mattered
GPU passthrough gets the attention, but Proxmox only feels reliable when storage, backups, and restores are organized properly.
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XDA ☛ I opted for native ZFS in Proxmox over a TrueNAS VM, and it’s the best decision I made
Setting up a NAS with used enterprise hardware is tricky enough, going native ZFS was a no-brainer
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XDA ☛ Proxmox 9.2’s load balancer solved a problem I didn't know my home lab had
Considering Proxmox’s fairly minimal system requirements, you don’t need killer rigs to build a home lab. In fact, I’ve been using cheap mini-PCs, old thin clients, and aged gaming systems I could get my hands on to power Proxmox experiments. Needless to say, as my arsenal of paraphernalia started to grow, I began grouping them in clusters. And with ZFS replication making high-availability significantly easier for budget-friendly PVE clusters, I’ve also configured my outdated workstations in an HA environment.
That said, although my HA cluster would migrate my Linux containers and virtual machines to my secondary rigs when a node goes down, I’d still have to keep an eye on the PVE cluster due to a certain quirk in Proxmox’s load-balancing provisions. But thankfully, the latest update to the virtualization environment added certain cluster management tools, and the dynamic load balancer is by far my favorite of the bunch.
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XDA ☛ Home Assistant OS 18.0 is out, and it’ll stop devouring your RAM on low-end devices
It's no secret that we love Home Assistant here at XDA. We've been tinkering with it (and its new AI tool) for a while now, and there's no sign of us stopping. One of our favorite uses for Home Assistant is running it on a low-end system like a Raspberry Pi and using it to control smart home actions.
Unfortunately, Home Assistant OS doesn't work so great on systems without a lot of RAM; that is, until now. An OS update has added a setting that better respects low RAM on your system.