Failover and Fault Tolerant Setup with OpenHAB

Hello all, I wanted to share some pretty sweet news! Over the weekend, I was able to configure OpenHAB to be pretty fault tolerant with a 2-server setup. I documented my setup and configurations on my blog site, and I thought you guys might want to see something I did with OpenHAB.

I have been running OpenHAB for over a year now on a Raspberry Pi. I also run Mosquitto MQTT broker with a great piece of software called MQTTwarn. On my phone, I run OwnTracks. So, with a Friday and a Saturday worth of work on my home automation move, here is what is complete:

  1. Install server OS on VM
  2. Install OpenHAB and all bindings currently in use
  3. Move OpenHAB configuration

My system does still have some points of failure, but they are not 100% critical. For example, my Z-Wave stick moves between the two servers via VirtualHere, which I documented. However, the USB server is still running on a Raspberry Pi, so if that Pi goes down, so does Z-Wave. But that’s not my entire setup, so it only breaks part of my setup.

All of my persistence is going to a load-balanced MySQL cluster. No local storage of persistence. This is a point of failure, but again, not critically damaging to OpenHAB.

I sounds like I have a ton of servers in my house (not the case). I have 3 servers in my house: a big file server, 2 decent ESXi servers. Most of my setups are VMs clustered between the 2 ESXi servers. I will be doing some tweaks to my scripts and will post updates. Just thought you guys might want to see something I did with OpenHAB.

If anyone has questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out! I’d love to hear how others are setting up their systems for fault tolerance.