HA in ProxMox, where should I run Frigate?

Installation
1

Hello everybody,
Hope this is the right category to post to.

For a two or more years I have been running HA Supervised on Debian with Frigate as a HA AddOn.
Since the very beginning I had Coral USB and everything was fine with HW acceleration.

hwaccel_args: preset-vaapi

My system is a HP
EliteDesk 800 G1 USDT Core i5-4570s 3.40 GHz 16 Gb 240 GB SSD. For years I have managed even 8 cameras, 5 of them the person recognition.

BUT since I knew HA Supervised is deprecated and won’t be supported I decided to go for HA in ProxMox.

At the moment my HA runs in ProxMox (because I would like to use hw resources also for other machines) and Frigate is still as an AddOn, but i had to remove the HW acceleration from frigate.yml configuration.

So I am considering to move Frigate, and the options are:

  1. Frigate in Docker on bare metal
  2. Frigate on ProxMox LXC

According to the documentation from Frigate the first option should be the one to go for:

Frigate runs best with Docker installed on bare metal Debian-based distributions. For ideal performance, Frigate needs low overhead access to underlying hardware for the Coral and GPU devices. Running Frigate in a VM on top of Proxmox, ESXi, Virtualbox, etc. is not recommended

Because of different views I read about I am asking for advice: which one is the the best to leverage HW Acceleration in your opinion alongside with my Coral?

Many thanks in advance!

2

You can still do hardware acceleration with frigate while running HA in a VM on proxmox. You just need to pass through the GPU to the VM.
I think Jim’s Garage on youtube did a good video on this.
If you want to run in an LXC in proxmox you can do that using the community scripts or just roll your own with docker and then the base docker install.
No need to give up proxmox to get GPU accel back.

3

Hello Dan
In the end I decided to have a VM for HAOS and a CT for Frigate, because somewhere I got you should not install anything in ProxMox host.

The first solution I tried was the one by TTeck (sadly passed away) named Frigate LXC which works really fast (less than 8 ms as inference with 5 cameras) but I am not happy because:

  1. Is based on Debian 11
  2. Uses Frigate 0.14.1 and is not updatable
  3. Does not use Docker (I think …)

Now I am working on a LXC based Debian 12 with Docker which runs Frigate 0.15 (stable). I want a “current version” solution which can be updated to get new features as they become available.
Next step will be reverse proxy, because I think this could help me to have Frigate Live in HA.
Let’s see … these are all new things for me!
Bye

4

There is a frigate proxy addon that will allow you to bring frigate into HA as if it were the addon in the way that UI is the same.

1 Like
5

Many thanks @danbutter !
I was going for a Cloudflare tunnel and reverse proxy, but this add on is the solution!
You made my day!