I’m thinking about setting up a second Home Assistant instance on the same network and could use some advice. The idea is to have my main instance handle all the usual stuff, while a second device (a Pi 4 with 4GB, which I currently use) will be dedicated as a Zigbee controller and Open Thread Border Router.
The main reason for this is to prevent my Zigbee and Thread networks from collapsing every time I restart Home Assistant. My Thread network especially takes forever to reconnect because several devices rely on multiple hops, and they all need to join the network in the right order. Plus, I’ll be moving my main HA server to a new room soon, and the new location isn’t ideal for placing the two radio antennas.
For this second HA instance, I plan to install just four add-ons: Open Thread Border Router, Matter Server, Zigbee2MQTT, and Mosquitto Broker. I’ll also be transferring the SkyConnect and SONOFF Zigbee Dongle Plus-P USB radios from my current instance.
Ideally, I’d prefer to run Home Assistant on this second device instead of installing Raspberry Pi OS with separate Zigbee/OTBR services. I’m much more comfortable with Home Assistant’s UI for updates and management, rather than having to deal with SSH or command lines to update the OS and services. I’ve been using macOS for ages, so I’m not really familiar with Linux.
Any suggestions or advice on the best way to set this up would be really appreciated!
EDIT: In case running a second HA instance isn’t technically possible, what’s the suggested way to keep the networks up during HA reboots and the antennas placed far away from the server?