High availibility, high stability hardware solutions

Hi There,

There is a video on YT about High Avaibility Home Assistant. It is based on Proxmox. Since most of my house and garden depends now on Home Assistant (hundreds of devices and 1000+entities) I continuously thinking of the reliability and HW alternatives. Of course I have a backup plan onto my NAS about the system, something like: 1 backup for every day form Monday to Saturday. Sunday backup for 5 weeks, 1 backup per each month’s first day etc. (currently just backup of the last 7 days, but I’m going to build up the plan above).
But I must have a backup plan in case of any HW failure. So I have an unused laptop, pre-installed HA on it on which I can restore my last working backup. Also I have an additional zigbee dongle which is different from my current dongle.
My first problem I don’t know (I never tried) how to make a good backup of my ZB dongle and how to restore on a new one in cse the old one brakes down. I use Z2M not ZHA.
So the issues:

  1. Backing up continuously the ZB as well
  2. Able to recover it on another dongle
  3. Have a good solution to continuously updating my 2nd HA hardware from the main one
  4. Find a solution to switch to the backup HW in case of any problem of the main HW automatically.

This topic planned to collect all the good ideas and solutions about high stability and high availability.

There’s a saying that enterprise backups should follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 different medias, 1 offsite copy), and also the 3-2-1-1-0 rule (add 1 offline/air-gapped copy and 0 errors on automated restore testing). Might be a bit overkill in a home environment, but a copy offsite (cloud) should be used.

I run my Home Assistant on VMware and use the free Veeam community edition to do snapshot-backups.

Sure. In my case my NAS has an offsite backup about the important files. So the physically separated copy is OK.
Currently I have a separate and dedicated HW for HA (HA Blue) and I’ll keep it totally dedicated and independent.
So the main issue to have a 2nd HW which is synced with the main system, including zigbee coordinator.

If you are looking into high availablility or replication my best bet would be using a hypervisor to run HA. I don’t have high availability or replication in use myself, mostly because I use a USB zigbee adapter that needs to be placed in one of my hypervisors. In the event of a server failure I could start up my virtual machine straight from the backup and move the stick over to the other server. That’s one of the benefits of running it virtualized, when you do a backup you actually take a backup of the whole machine, not just the configuration. I am a VMware guy myself but I assume Proxmox and other hypervisors have the option to set up replication / HA.

Or maybe you could do something fun with Kubernetes.

I’m still looking for something which is not virtualized. Would be nice something a 2nd HW which is continuously synchronized with the main system (or ever 5-10-15 minutes).
But the first thing to somehow backup my Zigbee coordinator regularly and be able to recover on a new device in case it is needed.

Yeah I understand your view. Just thought I would mention that both replicating every 5-10-15 minutes and zigbee backup you can solve by virtualizing (I have not tried to restore a zigbee backup so not 100% sure that in the case your coordinator dies you can restore to a different coordinator). But either way virtualizing requires hardware that can run it of course, so could get pricy if you do not have the hardware already in place.