Adding gear to an Eero World

Hello all,

When I sold my lab, all I had left was my Eero Wifi stuff.  As I got rid of my DNS and DHCP Eero took that over.  And everything worked really well.

But than I had to add a NAS to my home world. That was a little odd. I made it a DHCP client, and after it got an IP I went into the Eero app - Settings, Advanced, Reservations & Port Forwarding and made the NAS IP a reservation so it would always have the same one.  And since I use SMB to access that NAS and SMB advertises I am able to use the NAS without issues.

While I am sort of retired, I have gotten bored.  So I bought another lab.  Smaller but good gear.  And how to make it work in an Eero world is complex, but I think I have a plan.

1. Reserve IP in Eero for my two hosts and vCenter.  I will need to know MAC address, IP and nickname.
2. Deploy my gear.
3. The first VM I do must be a DNS VM.
   1. It should have forwarders like 8.8.8.8 or your local ISP DNS servers.
   2. It should become secondary on Eero.
   3. It should have the existing hosts and vCenter added to it.
   4. It should be primary on VMs. And be added to VMs already provisioned.

Once this is done and working, when you add a VM you do:

1. Reserve an IP.
2. Add it to the DNS VM.
3. Deploy your VM.

So once things are done it is mostly easy to add stuff.

I will add I have not done this yet as I do not have my gear yet. I have published my plan in case people have comments, suggestions, or better ideas. Once I have worked through this, I will update and add a little more info.

And yes, I have tried talking with Eero about this but did not get far or get any ideas or real help.

Updates:

• 9/16/20 - I have had some issues with this plan.  So I came up with a new plan.  The Eero will be connected with the Internet modem via a small switch. Our SONOs will be connected to the switch as well since SONOS is used via iPad in our house. The lab will be connected to our firewall which is connected to the Internet modem.  So no routing necessary I think.
• 9/13/20 - ESXi hosts will do the DHCP and let you reserve just fine.  But vCenter will not but in that case just give vCenter an IP that is not in use.  Then reserve it.
• 9/6/20 - Do do the IP registration as I suggest above.  Use DHCP on your hosts or VMs then go into the Eero app and make that IP reserved.  Much easier.

Michael

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