Using a c7 and a good chunk of my home automation relies on it. Now I'm thinking what if the hub go sideways or break, I will have a hard time re-engineer my heating to work without zwave.
I'm now planning to add either a c7 (because I'm very satisfied with it and its more than enough) or a C8 hub but I'm looking for using it in an active-active cluster if that's possible. Assume its tricky or even impossible because of the different zwave and zigbee macs of the devices but it maybe possible to clone even the macs ?!
Anyone have any experience of using a C7 and a C8 in active active cluster ?
My mission critical devices are all zwave (like heating control, etc...)
any help appreciated.
I don't think that's possible. The best you could do is have a hub protect subscription with automatic cloud backups and then have a spare hub on standby to minimize downtime. You can then pretty easily restore to the standby hub and up and running again in not time. If you were off site getting the replacement hub going may be a bit challenging.
I think the only limitation with the C7 is you cannot fully restore the zigbee to same network ID from a cloud backup and you need to reset and pair each device again (which will then assume its restore device entry). Z-Wave is fully restored without touching the devices. The C8 can restore both Z-Wave and Zigbee to a fully working state.
thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm a bit paranoid so I have no cloud connection. I have my offline backups at home. Restoring it onsite is ok just I don't want longer outage than let's say an hour when restoring devices.
if I have a DR scenario, I assume its not enough to just restore my c7 backup on a c8 , I also have to reset all my zwave devices and pair them with the c8. This is the painful part as I have relays built behind sockets and switches so its hard to reach.
as I re-read your post, you mean I don't need to reset zwave devices and re-add them if restoring c7 backup on a c8 right ? just to see I understand what you mean. so if this is true, I 'd better buy a c8 than a c7 if the c7 can't do a smooth restore.
Only the cloud backups include all the Z radio database info needed to seamlessly restore to a spare hub (without all that extra work of re-pairing devices).
It’s well worth the cost of a hub protect subscription for that feature alone, although the cost of the subscription also serves as an extended hardware warranty (i.e. a replacement hub)
no dial-home, no cloud connection. only my private vpn. then I think I will have a hard time but it is what it is. thanks! Maybe I consider hub mesh and at least adding half of my heating to a c8.
Or consider, over time, moving from Z-Wave to Matter - The Matter multi-admin stuff, with some hub-mesh global variables, and a set of heartbeats would allow you to track which is a "master admin" hub, and have your rules running in two places. - (Active/Passive)
Definitely adding lots more complexity - versus just a Z-Wave cloud restore.
But Z-Wave is the mess/problem here, that either requires re-pairing to a new hub, or a cloud backup with the detailed radio data.
Just need a bunch more matter devices to come out, for this to be more feasible in the future.
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I think Matter first needs to become as reliable as Z-wave, because for me , it's not even close.
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To each his own and clearly YMMV - But Matter over WiFi is definitely easier to deal with IMHO versys Z-Wave - To be fair, Matter is also rather limited, currently, with the set of available devices, but that situation is improving with time. Given the HA/Clustering question, there is really no easy option to do that without multi-admin (that Matter supports)
Z-Wave pauses, strange routing that I can't control or influence, security overhead, a low bandwith mesh (that drops with each hop) provisioning hell (un-pairing with ghosts, & Z-sticks, etc) - Wifi, on a dedicated IOT channel & SSID is much, much easier, to deal with, better tools to troubleshoot, do RF surveys - Given WiFi mesh support, in higher end routers, It's just all around easier, with better visibility
Don't get me wrong, issues with sharing credentials, and lots of matter specs revisions show that matter is still immature - granted - But long term, given the capailities that it already has, and the technologies it's built on, make it superior to ZWave, which has had a long time to mature (I do have 60 or so Zwave devices, so I've had the opportunity to stabilize my own mesh)
Zigbee is a bit more of a closer comparison, given thread, and TBRs - but again, given this topic is about active/passive failover - and given multi-admin functionality in Matter - that's possible. - It's not possible in Z-wave, and least with the current HE radio implementation.
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What you're asking for is discussed at [BETA] Hub Failover - AKA an opportunity to protect or destroy your environment
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thank you! The only "problem" is that I don't want any of my home automation stuff to be exposed to the public internet and reachable from the cloud. That's the reason why I have my own vpn and accessing my HE technically on "lan only" . I understand that as part of the business model, Hubitat does not want to provide and "poor man's" failover solution as getting paid for cloud subscription is significant income for the company.
I think at this stage the only way for me is to create a backup, have a spare hub and add each device one by one on hub failure.
You could open up when you want to back up the radios then close it off again. That said, using hubitat as a vector into one's network is unlikely. I'm a network engineer and I do a lot of security and honestly, Hubitat is the last thing I'm worried about. As far as someone possibly messing with hubitat itself, well, that also is unlikely. Not saying any of it is impossible, just very improbable.
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Same. I filter access to the Hubitat from other devices, but am not particularly concerned about its cloud services.
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