I came across a new community project for Pi-hole that I think is one of the more exciting things that I've seen for self-hosted DNS, since Technitium announced the native clustering feature in v15 at the end of 2025.
For years, if you wanted redundant Pi-hole instances you had a few different options, which have amounted to the following
- Point clients at two different Pi-hole servers and hope devices actually fail over correctly
- Use Gravity Sync (Pi-Hole v5) or Nebula Sync (Pi-Hole v6) to keep configurations synced
- Build your own keepalived or VRRP solution for a floating virtual IP
- Write custom scripts to enable and disable DHCP when a primary server failed
It worked, but it always felt like you were stitching together several different projects to accomplish this and I think that is why so many have been interested in Technitium lately.
This new project, Pi-hole HA, looks like a great project that might be able to solve this issue a little more elegantly it looks like.
Some of the highlights include:
- Automatic configuration sync between Pi-hole nodes
- Optional DHCP failover
- Virtual IP (VIP) support so clients can continue using a single DNS address
- Health monitoring between cluster members
- Native management page directly inside the Pi-hole web interface
- Works for both DHCP users and DNS-only deployments, automatically detecting which mode you're running during installation
What really caught my attention is that this doesn't appear to rely on SSH keys or external utilities you are running somewhere. The nodes communicate over HTTP and the project uses supported Pi-hole interfaces rather than patching Pi-hole itself. According to the author, everything is contained in a fairly clean installation with an uninstall option if you decide to remove it later.
As someone who has written quite a bit about home lab DNS redundancy, this feels like a much better solution even than the traditional Gravity Sync plus keepalived setup many of us have been using.
I also like that it supports a DNS-only mode. Many of us let our routers or firewalls handle DHCP and simply want redundant DNS with synchronized blocklists and settings. The installer apparently recognizes that config setup and doesn't try to take over DHCP automatically.
I haven't had a chance to deploy this in my lab yet, but it is definitely on my list to test. If it proves to be a reliable way to configure this over time, I could see this becoming the preferred way to build highly available Pi-hole deployments in home labs.
Has anyone here already installed it? I'm especially curious about:
- How reliable the failover has been
- Whether the VIP transitions are seamless
- How well it behaves on Docker deployments
- Any issues you've run into during upgrades
For anyone interested, here's the original announcement and documentation:
https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/release-pi-hole-ha-automatic-dhcp-failover-vip-and-config-sync-for-a-pi-hole-cluster/86667
There is also a pretty good Reddit thread where the author looks to be very responsive: Made a tool for automatic DHCP failover + config sync across multiple Pi-holes (bare-metal or Docker) : r/pihole
I'm looking forward to hearing if anyone has seen this and tested it as of yet? This looks like it could simplify one of the more common "DIY" pieces of home lab infrastructure around DNS if ones are looking to run Pi-Hole.