Moving Hermes to its own tiny Proxmox host

A homelab gets more useful when each change leaves the setup a little easier to understand than before.

This week I moved Hermes from my main Proxmox host to a small, low-power machine. The goal was not maximum performance. It was separation, lower idle power, and making one service less dependent on the rest of the lab.

The plan

The move was intentionally boring:

1. Back up the existing LXC container.
2. Install Proxmox on the new host.
3. Restore the container to local storage.
4. Confirm networking, startup behavior, and application health.
5. Leave notes here so I don’t have to rediscover the process later.

What I learned

Small infrastructure changes are a good reminder that backups are only useful when you can actually restore them. The restore test was as important as the migration itself.

Next I want to document the host configuration and the handful of settings I change on every fresh Proxmox install.