I'm the technical director of a local haunted trail in my area. Over the past few years, I've been building one off solutions to trigger events. My wife is asking to do some of the things I do at the house, within the haunt now, hopefully easing my one-off solution work.
I haven't tried it yet, but what happens if there is a second instance of home assistant on the network? I will be building the system at the house for the places she wants automations, but then transporting to the haunt. I figure that if needed, I can put the second installation on my guest network.
Scenario 1: You mean like a VLAN and split your logical network into two, and nary the two shall ever speak? Gasps! Here be dragons, of the very nasty, not just scary types. Be sure to read the vendor documentation closely and follow the steps without fail. Planning will save you lots of grief. Assign unique device names for troubleshooting purposes.
Scenario 2: The two systems are physically separated and there is no leakage of any network traffic between them? Go ahead, duplicate/clone the entire setup and experiment to your heart's content. HomeAssistant loves a flat network with no VLANs and remote access. Assign identical device names for troubleshooting purposes - any fix on one ecosystem should also work on the other. What works for you will also work for your wife.
Disclaimer: Should any packets cross the barrier, you better know exactly what their contents are and have a robust configuration to steer them to their appropriate destination and nowhere else.
Guest networks are typically separated on the vlan level, and do not need to be physically separated. However to have HA work and interact with clients on a guest network you cannot have client isolation.
VLAN seperation has been tried for ages - there is no need for physical separation to have one network not be able to talk to another. That's basically what you get when you set up a guest network - isolation.
It's "Home" Assistant, not "military grade" Assistant.
+1 for this. It's how I run my test server. When I first installed HA, I did a backup and restored it to a second server on the same network. Guest network/VLAN not necessary.
many people have a production and and a test HA installation. I use Proxmox to run the production server but sometime bring upa a second HA to try an experiment
They need different IP addresses and different hostnames. nd of course you do not want the control one device with two different servers. Or maaybe you could if they are Matter devices?
The anoying this is discovery. If you install a new (say) lightbulb both systems will find it and ask iof you want to install it. This is OK if the systems are small enough you can remember everything
If you wanted to isolate then you could use a second subnet on a different VLN and then the system just do not see each other. But you do not need to do this
I used to run a test system many moons ago when starting out, used to have 2 proxmox VM's and just shut one down and open the test VM restore a backup and mess with that then switch back.
This was just too much hassle in the long run. Now I just backup before testing something that might cause issues. Mostly though I just change one thing at a time and remember how to change it back if needed
