First off, I’m yet another current SmartThings user suddenly wandering the halls of openHAB-land, feeling like I’ve just woke, lying on the dirt at the bottom of a very dark and strange rabbit hole lol (don’t worry, I realize it’s not you. it’s me)
Anyway, I’m looking to gain HA redundancy by adopting an alternate, open source (OK, I guess ‘Free’ is technically and realistically more important for me right now) solution to run contemporaneously alongside my SmartThings universe, as a semi/fail-over controller for my HA system.
(I suppose this is where I should probably give you an out. So, tl;dr lol )
It obviously won’t be any sort of automatic fail-over type thing (unless you guys actually found magic and injected it into openHAB), but if ST ever burns down (it’s already STB a few times. So, that metaphor breaks down), at least I’ll have something else to use until they rebuild.
In such an event as a complete FAIL, or even one that is extended much longer than this current bought, it will likely take a concerted effort on my part, over at least a week for me to get all of my devices excluded from my ST environment, migrated into my openHAB system, and integrated into their pre-created counterpart rules, etc, or however it works here.
In fact, as long as virtual devices, and the ability to temporarily disable a rule and/or a device (but certainly a rule) are a thing in openHAB, I should be able to pretty much mirror my ST environment in openHAB (using a separate, distinct virtual device in place of each and every real one on the ST side, so that, to do the migration, all I will need to do is an exclude-from-ST/include-into-openHAB, and things should work exactly the same…well, except for the part about how ST really isn’t working at all right now (I mean, not up to the par of what it’s supposed to be).
However, that (at least a week for migration time) is not accounting for whatever ramp-up time I will need checking out the documentation, asking questions in the forum, practicing this and that, and generally getting up-to-speed on what this is, how it works, etc before day zero of the week-long migration process even begins.
Also, ya never know…if openHAB really kicks my ass, I may someday reconsider which of the two should actually be my primary. I am totally open to a ‘change in leadership’ if deemed necessary. Either way is fine, and if openHAB gets the nod from all of my department heads, I and/or my gear will just have to adapt.
So, I won’t necessarily put openHAB into full production mode right away, but I will repurpose a few ‘standby’ devices (which are not currently in use) from my current IoT zoo into openHAB, and use them as test devices while I am learning how to work in openHAB.
Once I’m up-to-speed, and have done enough testing to feel comfortable, I will likely migrate a certain portion of my current, live-production HA environment over to my openHAB system. This will allow me to do a real-world comparison of a number of things:
- local processing (this would be a must prior to ever really considering the ‘complete swap’ scenario)
- stability, consistency and reliability of the core system as well as all relevant, touching parts (and/or counterparts)
- broad spectrum of HA-protocols supported (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, Zigbee, IR, Insteon, X-10, Others?)
- device compatibility and full feature-set support (should be, but isn’t necessarily always covered by the entry immediately above)
- secondary system/service integration and interoperability (e.g. IFTTT, etc)
- community participation and peer-support
- developer support
By the way, I’m not really a coder in groovy yet (or any programming language for that matter), but I’m quite familiar with how and where to find things over there. So, let me know if anyone needs links or whatever (did I just say that? what a dork; anybody tech savvy enough, and/or courageous enough to venture out into something like this obviously knows how to search).
It has always been somewhere in the back of my mind, but I never thought I’d be constructing a redundant HA infrastructure before procuring the router needed for establishing redundant connections to the internet via two ISPs on two WAN ports, with monitoring, automatic fail-over, manual or event-based restore, and system configuration backups. My how quickly things can change.
Questions…
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Virtual Appliance?
Are there any openHAB ‘virtual appliances’ available, or is building from scratch the only option here? -
Testing in a VM?
As long as it’s just for testing, I assume running a Linux-based openHAB VM is OK (in my virtual infrastructure based on VMware vSphere ESXi running on a modified Dell XPS 8500, with i7 CPU [I could dedicate a core or two if need be], 32GB RAM (maxed-out), and plenty of SSD, HDD, DAS, NAS, and iSCSI RAID disk space to go around.). Please let me know if that scenario won’t work for any reason. -
Production on Discrete Dedicated Hardware?
Even without thinking about it much, it occurs to me that it may not be acceptable to run my production environment as a VM, because every time I’d need to go reboot my ESXi box, the openHAB system would need to be temporarily shut down (This could be mitigated with redundant ESXi boxes and a live VM replication/migration system, but…). I guess that’s not horrible though; I’d just as soon experience that than what’s going on with ST right now. lol
If you have any advice, or pointers, or just a link to something that you’d like to share, please do!