Using Unraid Home Assistant VM with Matter devices on a VLAN

Installation
1

Hi,

Finally got Matter devices working on an Unraid VM in their own VLAN, now sharing with others to hopefully avoid similar frustration.

Background: I run all my IoT devices on a separate, isolated VLAN, and have recently started using Matter devices, which require IPv6 and can be problematic when crossing networks. Whilst there appear to be some solutions, such as mDNS repeaters, it has additional complexity and feels like it’s fighting against the fact that Matter was designed for a single network.

My Home Assistant (HA) VM was originally running on the default network with external access provided by a locally managed Cloudflared tunnel using the addon. Whilst I could add Matter devices to my default WiFi network and have them connect to the HA Matter server, I couldn’t get it working when adding Matter devices to the IoT VLAN network.

The solution I used was to move my HA VM to the IoT VLAN, then configure HA for that VLAN.

The example below has the network on 10.10.0.0/16 with the VLAN on 10.10.42.0/24. I am using a Unifi network stack and Android for the HA mobile app.

Steps

  1. On Unraid disable Docker and VMs via Settings.
  2. In Network Settings enable VLAN and add a new VLAN. For example, use interface name IoT with VLAN number 42, network protocols IPv4 + IPv6 and I went with static IPv4 and automatic IPv6. For IPv4 I used an IP address of 10.10.42.2 and set the VLAN gateway 10.10.42.1.
  3. Enable Docker and VMs in Unraid, and ensure the HA VM is stopped.
  4. Edit HA VM setting the Network Source to your VLAN interface, i.e. br0.42.
  5. Start HA VM and from HA command line configure IPv4 network e.g. network update enp1s0 --ipv4-address 10.10.42.3 --ipv4-gateway 10.10.42.1. Note the IP address is different from the VLAN IP address defined in Unraid.
  6. Verify the network interface is configured correctly via network info on the command line.
  7. Verify HA VM has the expected IP Address in Unraid; you should see 10.10.42.3 and the Docker IPs on the VM settings page.
  8. Verify HA is reachable from a device on your default network e.g. curl 10.10.42.3:8123.
  9. [Optional] Verify your Cloudflared tunnel is healthy via the Cloudflare portal.
  10. [Optional?] Re-add the server to your Android app. I ended up clearing app local storage and cache, and going through the full auth setup again, whilst you could probably add another server, because I’m using Cloudflare it was the same domain name with a different IP, e.g. https://homeassistant.example.com, so I made a fresh start to avoid any confusion.
  11. Finally, verify everything is working by adding a Matter device via your mobile app whilst connected to the IoT 2.4Ghz network, adding to HA and testing the device is operational.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

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