Aruba Wireless Reviews

We provide Aruba Wireless in over 30 schools in Southeastern Wisconsin.

It has improved overall IT efficiency across the board. This has resulted in fewer wireless issues encountered and a more stable environment.

ClientMatch and AirWave: These have increased management purposes, reporting, etc.

Some additional reporting features about the clients would be nice when not combined with the AirWave management package.

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.