Aruba Wireless Reviews

I administered Aruba Wireless systems at two organizations. The first was a private college with around 12,000 endpoints campus wide, which included over 500 Aruba access points of various models and generations configured through the Aruba 7220 Mobility Controller. The second was a private high school with around 5000 endpoints and 130 Aruba access points, models 125 and 134, and configured through an Aruba 3600 Mobility Controller.

I have been maintaining Aruba Wireless systems at these two different organization for around 4 years in total.

A reliable wireless connection is imperative in a modern school setting. Our organization is forced to resort to inefficient methods without wireless internet. Aruba provides an easy to manage solution for my team.

The most valuable features have been the following:

• Reliability: Stable platform from controller to AP.
• Responsive support: When support is needed, the Aruba engineers are normally quick to respond to problems.
• Ease of Deployment: APs are very easy to configure to the network once they contact the controller.

Aruba has been an excellent solution. However, I am aiding in transitioning my organization to a different wireless solution due to the cost. We need to expand our network and the cost of new APs and an upgraded controller have proved to be prohibitive compared to similar solutions on the market.

Aruba is an excellent option for campus wireless. It can be more labor intensive initially than other options, such as Cisco Meraki, however it provides a reliable wireless platform that can be easily maintained by a small network team.

I sold both the Aruba hardware and software, primarily the IAP 100, 200 and 300 series, along with AirWave as well as ClearPass to SMB clients primarily with less than 500 employees. At the time, I worked for PGH Networks, a local MSP and Aruba certified partner.

I used this solution for four years from 2013 to 2017.

Aruba provided a great product offer for clients of all sizes and scopes. Everyone needs WiFi. Aruba allowed for the detailed control and management of an entire WiFi network from a single screen backed by a support team with local SEs who work with business partners to ensure the product's success.

• Instant access points and ClearPass
• IAPs could be deployed without a controller, solving sticky clients by peeling away users crowding one AP and can have settings pushed from a master AP.
• ClearPass and AirWave gave highly accurate detailed reports of who used which applications when and the ability to throttle users if they were bogging down the network with superfluous activity.

Larger network for Aruba users and partners. I would have liked to see more manufacturer driven events and outings to drive brand recognition and familiarity.

Provide WiFi access for an elementary school pre-kindergarten to eighth grade. Serving about 350 students with mobility Internet connection. The building infrastructure is a solid, old school, preventing your regular AP from being able to penetrate through walls.

Teachers and students have access to technology within the classroom which is used daily side-by-side complementing their education.

Most valuable feature of the solution is the ability for a student or teacher to be able to roam freely from classroom to classroom, no matter the floor, without dropping a signal.

The ability for newer devices to easily communicate with older style APs. I wish the APs had the ability to enter in notes about a specific AP. For example, AP Mac address goes to classroom 123.

We had Aruba controllers and APs installed in over 1,000 retail stores and in several large distribution centers.

The product improved overall scalability and simplicity in configuring and replacing. This product replaced old Symbol wireless AP’s that required individual configuration and management. The use of an Aruba Controller to configure multiple APs was game-changing. We went with Aruba over Cisco at the time, simply for cost.

The most valuable feature in this product would be the stability. You build it, install it, and it’s good to go, with no further tweaks needed unless adding or replacing APs.

An area of this product that could use improvement would be the troubleshooting. At times I had to engage Aruba Support which ran some pretty complicated troubleshooting commands. I would not have been able to do with existing CLI documentation.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. It proved to be stable with minimal failures that I saw in the three- to five-year time frame I worked with them.

We have Aruba IAP-225 APs in both a school and a health center environment. We initially had 15 of them installed at the school about three years ago and kept expanding to 45 APs at this site.

Our school was a challenge as each room has cider block walls, so we deployed a single AP in the ceiling above the wall of two classrooms. We primarily have laptops and iPads that connect in various classrooms and for training.

We had such great success that we have deployed 40 APs in a five level building to support a new Health Center that opened in January.

We have just started to use the captive portal option at our health center to direct clients to our patient portal while restricting bandwidth so they do not get carried away in the waiting room.

The full mounting kit has worked well above the ceiling.

The best part of the configuration is the virtual controller that we use to manage the environment. It provides redundancy of any AP acting as the controller should it go down. There are other controller purchase options for higher numbers of APs to support, but having this option has kept costs down and the devices have a lifetime warranty. The virtual controller has options for updating and remotely restarting any AP from one controller panel, and monitoring and configuration has been fairly simple from one console.

The ceiling grid mount clips have room for improvement. 

Support through third party vendors or direct from HPE has been easy to manage. They are very responsive.

We purchased Aruba Wireless for our new office that we were opening in Austin, TX. I needed a solution which was simple to administer, easy to implement, cost effective, and tied into our existing Active Directory environment.

As we have acquired a few companies, having the ability to have multiple RADIUS connections has helped us.

• Having it work with our Active Directory domain. 
• Having a RADIUS authentication was a bonus.

My biggest issue is the logging. It is hard to read when troubleshooting issues.

I would buy it again.

Doctors offices, car dealerships, and small business. It is used to provide internal, guest access.

We originally were using SonicPoint and had tons of connectivity issues. We switched to Aruba to fix all the issues with all my clients.

I like the IAP line and being able to have a true mesh without the need of a controller. The features included in them are also very nice with a built-in website for ToS for guest access.

The price point is pretty high compared to Ubiquiti and other equipment.

None, which is why this product turned into my go to solution.

The largest implementation that I was able to do was about 15 APs, with no issues.

I have never had to use technical support. The product is very simple to use.

I used SonicPoint. The connection stability was very poor. Though, the firewalls worked well.

The initial setup is straightforward. Configure one IAP and all the rest self-configure to that one.

Price is fairly expensive, however it is worth it. If the “master” fails, another AP can take over the role.

We evaluated Ubiquiti, Hive, Netgear, Cisco, and Meraki.

Grab a couple and test them out. The features that these things have available and the ease of setup are fantastic.

We are using Aruba Instant in four remote branch offices. We chose this solution at the time because of its controllerless feature and easy setup.

It provided an easy WiFi solution for our branch offices to deploy. We could usually have them up and running from out-of-the-box in about 10 minutes.

The controllerless feature. It will randomly pick one of the APs to be the designated master. If that access point fails, the role is moved to another AP. This saves a lot on management and infrastructure costs.

There is plenty of room for improvement. Reliability of a flawless upgrade after the 4.x releases is rare. There is a lot of manual intervention required lately due to random bugs. If you have a mix of APs using different firmware, it takes nothing short but an act of god to upgrade successfully. 

The product’s performance got worse with newer releases as well. It seems like they are adding more frivolous features and sacrificing stability and speed. The latest design of their APs removes the console port and requires purchasing an expensive proprietary cable just to access the console.

Occasionally, it needed to be rebooted. I used to have issues with DHCP. It is extremely buggy and difficult to upgrade with different firmware versions/models.

I do not know what the maximum number of APs in a cluster can be (for the Instant series), but I never seemed to hit a limit. At one site, we had 12 clustered together.

It seemed to be good when we needed it. This was before HPE purchased them. I have not had a need to contact support since then.

The other way around, we have switched away from Aruba to Ruckus. Aruba’s poor performance and random upgrade issues caused too much time consuming maintenance and troubleshooting. Ruckus Unleashed has been flawless; performance almost doubled, and it is far easier to configure.

The initial setup was very simple. There were some settings which were confusing and unlabeled when trying to use the online help with the newer firmware.

Trial different solutions and compare pricing to how well they perform, their stability, how easy it is to maintain, etc.

At the time when we first started using them, we did not evaluate other options. They seemed to be only ones back then who could cluster APs without requiring a separate controller.

Perform a site survey and get a model that supports the latest AC technology.

At first, the product was a solid 10. As time went on, and newer firmware was released, the product has dropped significantly to maybe a four or five rating out of 10 due to various bugs and design issues. We no longer use Aruba for any new sites and are slowly phasing them out from our locations with a different controllerless product that has drastically increased reliability and performance.