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Hello all,

I've been fighting with razberry7 pro on top of rpi4B and it just doesn't work reliably (if at all). I've dug around the internet, tried different software on it, verified that firmware is up to date and so on and even fed my logs to LLMs in hopes they could spot something. Currently my z-wave devices are practically useless (gladly I got devices with physical controls too) and based on discussions around I'm not alone.

So, I think it's time for me to just get something better. Ideal device would be wired over ethernet and have z-wave and zigbee hubs and possibly POE, but I haven't found any which would also be fully supported by HA.

ZWA-2 should be pretty solid choise, but I'm running HAOS in a virtual machine on my proxmox host and I'd really like to have an option to migrate VM to different hardware as needed but that would require also physically moving the USB plug from one host to another.

What are your experiences, what I should get? I'm in EU, so frequencies need to match, but otherwise I'm pretty open for suggestions and having a rock solid z-wave network is a top priority. If it means using ZWA-2 or some other USB gadget I can work with it, but, again, ideally I'd like to have something wired to the network. Wifi is of course an option, but good old ethernet would be preferred.

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[-] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago

Is there a particular reason you want to put your z-wave controller on the network, rather than just plugging it into the proxmox hardware? (Assuming I've read your post correctly). Are you looking to do high availability on the VM or something?

I found running HAOS in a VM, and passing through USB devices worked really well, and I just bought the bog-standard z-wave dongle from Aeotec.

[-] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Sort of high availability. I don't really have the hardware right now for proper high availability setup, but I have a spare laptop running proxmox which I use for pihole and other 'network critical' stuff when doing maintenance for the main server. I don't have any doubts about passtrough working, I'd just like to have flexibility on the environment and thus it'd be nice to have z-wave controller on ethernet.

But I think I'll end up with ZWA-2, I'll just use usb hub or something to make it physically easier to move HAOS VM between different hardware.

[-] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

To be honest, part of the reason I leaned towards having the radios on the same box, was simplicity.
I have a box, with a VM, VM is backed up, new box could be stood up if needed and restored from a backup.
The other was, when I knock over the network (don't ask...), I don't lose logged data from the various sensors.

If you did want to be able to fail over quickly, so long as you make the USB device paths match (ie, have them on the same device in proxmox), you should be able to swap things over inside 10 minutes.

[-] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 23 hours ago

Yeah, it's not really a problem when I'm at home, but there are times when I'm not physically nearby the hardware and on those cases it'd be nice to have option to migrate HA to different hardware on the fly.

Also having z-wave controller on ethernet would make it a bit easier to position antenna in the middle of everything, my server isn't the centerpiece of our living room after all.

this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
11 points (92.3% liked)

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