Aruba Wireless Reviews

Aruba's good. It's almost over-complicated for what we need it for.

Aruba gives me the security that I need because we have WiFi for employees, and the public. It allows me to monitor them and block them or do whatever I need to to keep them in check.

It's a little bit over-complicated. They could simplify the interface. Also, the update procedure from their website could be a little better. Finding the firmware the first time is a pain.

They're good. As long as you have the right controller in place to have enough APs for your business, then it's great. You can stack them. They're just a good product.

You just plug them in, and once you get them configured, they're great from there.

The licensing could always be a little bit cheaper. Everybody complains about that, but you just plug them in and I rarely have to think about it and that's the product I want.

I looked at Cisco and I can't remember the other vendor. Once again, Cisco was price-point was higher. Aruba gave me every feature I needed and more so they were a good fit for us.

Make sure you know how many APs you want to throw up there. Remote APs, stuff like that, and size your controller properly, but not for now but five or six years in advance because you don't want to replace it every other year so that'll be my biggest piece of advice.

As a network engineer, the feature that I value with Aruba is the management of the devices, like the one-touch provisioning of a wireless network.

Aruba Access Points are like plug-and-play devices that you just turn on and leave there and will automatically speak with its controller! It just makes the network administrator's work easier.

I worked on getting the root cause of multiple alarms of wireless access points in our management platform and found it to be caused by a software bug of the current version in the wireless controller. While doing this task, I found that the TAC support people I worked with have limited knowledge or comprehension of the what's going on as I was passed around to other engineers a few times.

I used to troubleshoot these devices for six years.

Due to the software bug I encountered (forgot the version), it appeared like that multiple access points were unstable, software speaking, but were not down physically.

Just slightly above the middle rating because not all technical support have the same caliber of troubleshooting an issue.

I also worked with the Cisco wireless solution as I manage several enterprise networks that use different solutions. I would say that managing Aruba products is easier than Cisco.

For a person who has been brought up with Cisco devices, I could say it was complex when I started working in Aruba's CLI.

We just used the cheat sheets we have in our SharePoint, following what the previous engineers did when setting up.

From a person who tried managing multiple wireless device platforms, there were little to no incidents that we receive for Aruba devices for a specific period of time. Though the biggest contender of this product line has been setup to majority of our customers, it appeared that Aruba devices are more stable.

Aruba is the only other wireless vendor besides Cisco that offers the flexibility of using AP's in any combination of the 3 controller-based architectures.

Lots of Flexibility but with flexibility comes complexity. Flexibility is great for large organizations but the Aruba instant AP may be good for smaller organizations.

I have worked with Aruba gear for 4 years.

Any issues I encountered were resolved quickly with an excellent TAC.

Aruba has a very scalable product with different hardwar, software and complementary products such as AirWave and ClearPass.

TAC is really a 9+

I have worked with other great vendors like Cisco, Meraki, Motorola, etc.

There are ways to sidestep the complexity available with Aruba, but if you do not need the advanced features of Aruba then Aruba instant or another vendor may suit your needs best.

It gives us centralized management for all campuses and all wireless access points. Students have guest networks, so the centralized management help us to manage all of users.

Some of the diagnostic features I'd expect to help me troubleshoot parts of the network are missing. I'd like to have diagnostic tools to pinpoint where devices are not getting good signals and why.

We've been using it for about four to five years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had only minimal outages over the past 5 years thanks to the High Availability solution for the controllers and the access points. If we do have an outage on one controller, the access points can free-associate to another controller on another campus and still function properly for the students and staff. So this is a very stable solution.

We've been able to scale sufficiently for our needs.

Customer service and technical support have always been great. We've never had an issue getting support from Aruba. We've always had quick responses and very helpful solutions when we contact them.

Before Aruba, we were on individual "fat" access points, so we had to manage each one individually.

It's pretty simple. Once the master controller and the local controllers are set up, it's just a matter of syncing the configurations, so you do the configuration once on the centralized controller, and everything gets replicated to all the local controllers at each campus. Adding, removing, changing, bringing on new controllers to replace old controllers is a pretty simple process.

I think originally we were in the $30-50,000 range, with yearly maintenance costs and support for licensing, which cost $10-$15,000.

We needed a more centrally-managed solution so that you didn't have to manage each individual AP. When we sought out quotes, we looked at Aruba, Meru, Cisco, and a couple of others. Based on the features and the scalability and all the deployment solutions and everything that we needed, Aruba was the best solution for us.

Make sure you get a proper configuration. Do a proper site survey of your location to know what you need to configure and how you need to customize it to your own environment so that when you deploy your wireless, you're not popping up with any surprises from a bad signal or bad interference in certain places. Just make sure you know your area and you customize your solution around what your area provides for you.

It's very adaptable from the access point line. We've found that ClearPass products have met our performance marks to the letter. They sold us on foundations stats and provided us with everything we asked for. They didn't come up short and were dead on the money.

It's provided our students with such reliable service that they just expect it to be there and take it for granted. They come to school, blackboard their work, get on YouTube, chat with friends, etc., and then go home, not realizing that they used the college network. We've been able to give them the best experience possible, and their feedback has been amazing. If there are ever any hiccups, the complaints and tickets pile up very quickly.

Our users, for the most part, haven't noticed hiccups because of the HA capability and the speed at which the controllers can authenticate. In fact, the last couple updates have boosted the quality and redundancy. Students have been able to watch YouTube videos without any noticeable rendering issues during hiccups.

We have a few IAP's and that's sort of like the standalone home router stuff. They're lacking in functionality, and though they are designed for standalone small deployments, they don't give you the good standalone fun stuff that you expect on a smaller scale router, like good DLNA. I wish they were a little bit more progressive on their IAP line.

Before HP bought Aruba, the release dates for codes were very predictable and quick. Code release were always visibly available. But since HP's acquisition, normal and quarterly release dates have been delayed, probably because of continued integration between the two companies. One specific issues is that we want to deploy their latest and greatest AP, but they don't have a GA code version available yet. We're still waiting.

I know that's a very specific complaint, but it actually has impacted us because we keep a flush on the older access points on hand just in the event code gets delayed by a few weeks. It's now been delayed by a month to two and I have to buy older access points. I can't deploy the latest and greatest.

I'm hoping things get smoothed out when they start getting their product lines and their flow of products and code deployments get fixed. I've been a little disappointed in that.

Also, I've found some of their onboarding stuff to be overkill and not worth the price. Their base stuff that's included in ClearPass is absolutely amazing, but the fringe things are superfluous and overcharged. The core stuff, though, is exactly what you pay for.

We're essentially an Aruba shop. We have uniform wireless AP's ranging from AP 125's, which are slowly going to be de-commissioned on our next product cycle, all the way up to AP 325's in our fleet. We have three 7240 controllers, and one 7210 controller as our test platform box that we use for benchmarking and a few other projects. They're basically fully-licensed and we are basically all-wireless. We do not have any HP switching gear in-house or Aruba switching gear. All of this is controllers and access points for the hardware side. For the software side, we have AirWave, which monitors our entire wireless fleet in controllers, and ClearPass. We have three ClearPass appliances -- one is a hardware box and another is a VM box. Both of them are 25K units and one 5K unit appliance, as well as hardware.

We've been using them for about 10 years I would say, maybe nine years.

It deploys extremely quickly.

The controller is a rock solid 10 out of 10, the access points are 9.5 out of 10, ClearPass is 10 out of 10, and AirWave is 9 out of 10.

It scales incredibly well. We did have some scalability issues with the system a long time ago, but they fixed that rather quickly. We also changed product lines at around that time. We were outgrowing the product a little bit too quickly, but since we've moved to the new controllers, it's been rock solid.

Technical support is very good, but it's dependent on the engineer you get. Sometimes you'll get a fantastic engineer and your problem is solved right away. Sometimes you might have to jump through a few more hoops. Sometimes you get the Cisco experience where you must follow the bouncing ball and complete all the 10 questions. You know how your product works, you don't need to complete 10 questions. You have a problem and want an engineer who can solve this really quickly.

I've noticed that it's been getting better over time. It used to be bad about four years ago. Over the last two to three years, it's been getting a lot better. As long as you fill out the surveys, I tend to find that the service has been getting better and better and better. You get your resolution pretty quickly. So I'm generally quite happy with the tech calls.

I've noticed they've scaled back a little bit of their SE's. I guess that's because they're such a big company.

The initial setup tends to be both straightforward and complex. Although I haven't done an initial setup in a while, everything just clicks together very well. When I did do an initial setup, the wireless controller was up and running within a few minutes. Deploying new controllers into the cluster takes seconds. There are a lot of wizards and guides built into the controllers for setup. So it's very easy.

ClearPass is a little harder, and AirWave is medium difficulty. ClearPass is the hardest part to get going without a good amount of training.

Day-to-day costs are generally very low. We have very few problems with the system, so our maintenance costs and hours that we put into solving problems is generally very low, which makes my life really easy to work on other issues that come up. Our wireless system generally doesn't generate a lot of day-to-day issues.

Initial costs for purchasing the system? It's on par with other vendors, but is a little bit cheaper than the equivalent of what we were getting out there, so I feel that we got really good value.

Make sure you buy the system that suits your network. They have a very broad pallet, so you can buy one that's overkill and buy one that's underkill. Make sure you spec and follow the guides appropriately. Also, you have to have a very good concept of how fast you're going to grow and how much you're going to grow because if you don't have a really good idea of what your growth curve is going to look like, you can easily buy something that doesn't fit perfectly.

Proper planning for scaling, and knowing what your growth curve is going to be is key. Work with the SE's on figuring out the plan is very important. Aruba has a very broad product line on scalability, so that can hurt you and help you at the same time. It is very nice to have.

There are a couple of valuable features of Aruba Wireless for us. First is ClearPass, which is an authentication product, and second is AirWave, which is a reporting function.

AirWave allows us to do different reporting on WiFi utilization at our different campuses so I can break down different areas of the college and find out how many users are using the network at any given time. I can find out the utilization of different access points, which allows me to do capacity management.

It needs the ability to perform mobility device management. They should have some kind of mobility device management built into the product.

You need to make sure that the controllers at the access points have the capacity to handle the additional licenses. Otherwise, buying additional licenses won't necessarily scale.

We're very happy with the Aruba. We've been using them for about the past five years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

For the most part, stability is excellent.

All you need to do is buy licenses for the access points that you have on those campuses.

9/10. The customer service we get from our sales rep is excellent.

Technical support is always going to take more time. If there's any kind of issue it needs to be replicated, it needs to be taken away and examined certainly more than customer service.

We were using another vendor to provide WiFi capabilities. Although it didn't have any limitations, Aruba integrated better with our existing equipment.

It's very easily set up.

I don't know what the ROI is on this. It's difficult to value the experience that the students have and the staff have, so to put an actual number on that is going to be very difficult.

We looked at other vendors before deciding on Aruba.

Make sure you're fully aware of all the products around WiFi and capitalize on any ones that are out there that would help your specific environment.

• Firewall
• Virtual controller
• Compatibility with controller-based and controller-less solutions

It supports different classes of services for different types of users, has easy management, is easy to use, etc.

The RF needs to be improved.

We started using it one month ago.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

8/10

There have been no scalability issues.

8/10

I'd rate technical support 9 out of 10.

We switched for its new and advanced features, as well the lifetime warranty.

It's just plug-and-play.

We implemented it with support of vendor and I would rate them as 9/10.

The IAP licence that we use is free.

• Cisco
• Eugenius
• Ubiquity

It is a very stable and scalable solution.

Four years ago, our network was incapable of handling our anticipated throughput. We knew we had issues in our network, so we made sure our switches and infrastructure were OpenFlow-enabled. We originally planned for three devices per student, but now we're seeing four or five and sometimes more with wearable devices. Now, with Aruba Wireless, we're SDN-enabled with networking thrust re-route or pick-ups at the switch edges.

Aruba Wireless allows us to integrate our network with different HP technologies. We want to have a single vendor with a rapid-enough life-cycle. HP isn't held back by the workload or lowest common denominator, or by the fact that we have locations in Australia, Vietnam, and other places on that side of the globe. We can use Aruba Wireless everywhere and manage it effectively. It is doing everything we need it to do and it's giving me the flexibility to go where I want to go.

It could always be improved to be a better risk-related investment. We need to maximum our investment and to have it work to its fullest potential for us. I'd like to see it get to the point where SDN works well with HP Net Protector.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We had lots of issues on the network routers until about 12 months ago, having to do with the architecture. We had too much load at the core by allowing too many wireless users.

We run two-and-a-half gigabytes through the wireless system. We're looking for even greater throughput, and I think it'll scale to accommodate this.

Technical support has been good. We have a support contract with HP and access to the right people when we need them. However, HP's presence in Australia is a little light.

Definitely look at SDN to take some costs out of your network. If you can, go with HP ConvergedSystem because it's the simplest, fastest way to virtualize your networks.