Proxmox yes or no?

Installation
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I am just reading this now, and I will ask one question. Is your mini PC going to dedicated to HA or run other things? If it is dedicated HA system, don’t run ProxMox, just run HA OS directly. If you plan running multiple VM’s, then yes ProxMox is good. There are complications to running ProxMox, so it is definitely for the more advanced user. Some mini PC’s won’t support all hardware in ProxMox without tinkering. IT all depends what you want to use your system for and what you plan running.
I would NOT run an interactive VM on the same machine as your Home Automation Hub. Keep your VM machines as headless, stand alone and not interactive. You start running interactive machines that you use daily on the same device as your appliance style VM’s and you’ll lead yourself to trouble ,especially if things start freezing up and accidental shutdowns and things like that.
If you run infrastructure style VM’s, Keep them headless in your network rack, or whereever your network infrastructure is housed. IF you want an interactive machine, like Windows 11 for day to day use, then keep that on a separate machine. I guess it depends if you can risk your Home Automation and other appliance style VM’s crashing and being offline.
Mini PC’s are cheap these days, though admittedly RAM and Storage is getting pricey.
A lot suggest ProxMox without thinking of the entire use case. Sometimes just a smaller system works just as well. You won’t notice a difference if the smaller systems still have spare resources. IF you like to tinker and don’t mind your home automation breaking, then I guess you can do many different things. If you require a very reliable home automation system that doesn’t crash, seriously consider what you would use other VM’s for if going ProxMox.

Edit: HA on Virtual Box in Windows is a bit rubbish. I would never do it. There is a native VM build for HA for ProxMox. You don’t need Windows just to run Virtual BOx. That would just chew up a tonne of resources running a bare metal virtualisation like ProxMox then running Windows 11 to run another virtulisation (Virtual Box) A quick google search can find you the community scripts

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I used my N150 mini pc for NAS (Openmediavault) and Home Assistant on a chrombook (rooted for linux) both bare metal for over a year before realizing I could have put both of them in the mini PC via proxmox and that’s what I did.

Although there are some customization needed (mainly passing through the GPU for jellyfin, frigate, and a couple of other dockerized services in the openmediavault VM) and the sonoff zigbee and zwave USB dongles to HA, they were more straight forward than I thought before the setup. Having both of them plus proxmox running with the amount of physical RAM in mini PC is a bit tight but after about two weeks I have not had any OOM events yet but your miles may vary.

Mini PC: Kamrui GK3 Plus: N150, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD (~$100 back in 2024) 12v x 2.5A
A 120mm PC fan is used to cool the computer since the whole setup is in a cabinet 12v x 0.3A
Drives: 2x 12TB USB drives with no brand USB to SATA adapters 12v x 2A each