Planning VLANs for home network

Hardware Hub Networking
1

I’ve recently installed home assistant and gotten a few smart devices, and I think it is about time to separate the home network up into different VLANs before it grows too unmanageable.

Goals:

  • Separate smart home crap from the rest of my home network
  • Maybe setup a guest network
  • Finally switch home network to use a password that isn’t our landline number

Networking Equipment I have:
Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra (Acting as router + unifi controller)
2x Unifi APs (1x AC Lite and 1x AC Pro)
3 Unmanaged switches scattered around the place

Smart home related stuff I have that connect via the network:
A few TPLink tapo smart plugs
A switchbot smart plug
A few broadlink smart IR remotes
A Tuya smart plug (I’m throwing it out so it can be ignored)
A home assistant install running in a VM on my NAS

Other networked devices:
A 3d Printer (Ender 3 V3 KE, using Wifi)
A Printer (Brother MFC-T920DW, using Ethernet)

I have completely no experience with VLANs but here’s what I would like to do in terms of VLANs, open to feedback:

  • VLAN for home network (Servers, Devices owned by family members)
  • VLAN for smart home things
  • VLAN for a guest network

Questions:

  1. How do I handle home assistant? I would like it to be able to discover smart devices in the network instead of having to manually find the IP addresses of new smart devices each time I add one.
  2. Would the servers fit better in their own VLAN or within the same home network VLAN?
  3. Where would the printers fit in terms of VLANs? Airprint will be required to function as all but one device in my family relies on Airprint to print.
2

I suggest you watch through some of these videos to get an idea how to do what you want. To type it up would take way too much text and time when people already have plenty of videos showing you:

1 Like
3

Thanks for these resources. My setup is more humble than OP, yet I’m thinking VLANs ought to be in my future.

Quickly, are these useful for non-Unifi setups? I’m stuck on ISP/trash access points for the time being so I’d like to learn the basics and not get stuck in a rabbit hole or pickup bad habits due to certain environments being proprietary

4

I think what will help the most is to get familiar with the general idea of subnets (in IPv4)

If you get that, going to VLAN is a small step (imo)

Regarding OPs question about HA. What opened a complete new world to me was the posibility to assign container to various networks , including VLAN. So maybe make two VLANs for HA were only one has internet access ?