The production instance of Home Assistant is running via the Home Assistant Operating System on a virtual machine (VM) in a VMware vSphere cluster, with a remote instance running on a Raspberry Pi 4 which has multiple USB radios connected (Currently Zigbee, Z-Wave, and an RTL-SDR dongle for 433mhz devices).

This is done for multiple reasons:

• Allow HA to communicate directly with wireless devices without the need for an external hub.
• Prevent having to pass USB devices through to virtual michines.
• Enable VMware to migrate the main HA VM across hosts within the cluster based upon load.
• Place radios in a more central location with better reception.

Instances are linked together using Lukas Hetzenecker's home-assistant-remote custom_component, which allows for all configuration to be completed within Home Assistant, without the need to worry about using USB/IP or socat to push the devices over the network. I've looked into using MQTT discovery, but the issue is advertisement intervals. Devices show up instantly with the homeassistant-remote component, even after restarts.

This configuration controls a couple of significant features in my smart home.

• Alarm Clock using my bedroom lights and TV
• Turning on/off lights at sunset/sunrise
• Arming the alarm system when nobody is home
• Security lighting when motion is detected at my front door

Note: Private information is stored in secrets.yaml (not uploaded)