ExtremeCloud IQ Reviews

• Very easy deployment
• Great radio performance
• Application signatures – very powerful L7 firewall
• Tools for troubleshooting of Wi-Fi clients

We implemented more advanced Visitors networks on our sites and also more strict security rules for bring your own device and other wireless access networks. That wasn't possible without L7 firewall on AP itself. Also before we didn't have central management for all APs at our organization – now we can change anything we want from within one place.

Aerohive configuration management can be little hard to understand for someone who has never worked with it. The initial configuration is easy but advanced tuning needs deeper knowledge of Wi-Fi technology and also about Aerohive management.

On the other hand – the support is very helpful and documentation is very large and contains almost everything that can be found at HIVE console.

One year and 6 months.

No. Deployment was smooth with any major problems

We had/have some problems with stability, but it’s not problem with Aerohive itself. We are covering manufacturing/industrial environment, which is emitting lots of interference on the 802.11 b/g/n band. Stability on this band is very poor due to the environment, but on 802.11 a/n band (because of more channels) stability is very good.

Scalability is not a problem at all. At some places we have “high density mesh” and L2 roaming along with automatic channel distribution is working very well.

Customer service is very helpful. Before deployment we were speaking with our regional customer service and then directly with Aerohive. Both gave us the necessary information for deployment and initial configuration.

Customer service is very helpful. I am using two different ways to solve the problems – one is through my regional contact (Aerohive reseller + support) and second is directly with Aerohive support. We submitted some cases and all were solved with an explanation of function or a bug fix in a new release.

We had “non central management” wireless solution before Aerohive. That was our primary goal for switch – to have central control over wireless connection at whole company and enforce different set of security policies.

Initial setup was straightforward – it’s very easy to deploy it. We had a pilot on one site, where all our needs were tested and then solution was deployed to the rest of company.

We deployed by “in-house company” team. Initial/tuning configuration was done by me and physical deployment was done by local IT support on remote sites.

Yes – we did evaluations of some other products.

We tested Cisco Meraki – Meraki is very good product, straightforward with configuration, but they don't provide central management which can be kept in-house, but only hosted on their cloud. We were not satisfied with it, because we want to keep all our info inside our network.

We also tested Cisco APs with controllers, but again this architecture is not something that would suit us, because of absent central management.

Initial deployment is very easy but tuning and understanding of all things at management can take some time. Once it is set and working – it is very good solution with wide range of possibilities.

The automatic PPSK is a great feature that a lot of clients use. For me personally I find the easy web interface for general system maintenance makes the product a joy to work with.

There are some minor bugs in parts of the software which can cause some issues from time to time, but it's like any other piece of software. These are often quickly fixed in updates and patches which are easy to deploy but better detail in the release notes would be useful from my point of view supporting the product.

Approximately 2.5 years as an end user, and 18 months looking after it from a technical standpoint.

No - plenty of deployments done easily. Just ensure for HMOL deployments the firewall ports are open!

Once the system is up and running not had any stability issues.

Nope the system scales very easily, just add AP's and licenses and off you go.

Aerohive support are very responsive albeit sometimes takes a bit of time to filter through the intial layer 1 of support.

Very simple to deploy initially - There's a Wizard to generate a basic SSID and get connected. More in depth configuration can then be done easily once basic connectivity has been established.

In house implementation.

• Scalability - No controller so no single aggregation point and no single point of failure!
• Resiliency - All AP's in a common hive automatically create a mesh network so that if there are issues upstream in the wired network, traffic is routed around the failure. Each AP runs a layer 2 SPF algorithm to automatically determine the shortest/best path from one point to another.
• Security - All AP's have a statefull firewall built-in which makes security policy enforcement at the edge a breeze. Unlike a lot of wireless vendors, security is a cornerstone of the Aerohive product.
• Mobility - With the BR100/BR200 or the AP 350 our road warriors can take the corporate WLAN with them wherever they travel. The BR100/BR200 devices allow you to utilize both a wired network as well as a 4G USB dongle to provide transport for the IPsec connection back to the Cloud Virtual Gateway (CVG). The CVG is a virtual appliance that you run in the datacenter to terminate the IPsec tunnels.
• Simplicity - A GUI so simple to use that you truly cannot screw it up.
• Serviceability - This is especially nice for those hard to reach AP's. If for some reason an AP loses its mind and cannot be reached either via the mesh network or via the wired network it will dynamically engage a feature called the Access Console, or AC. The AC has a special SSID that is broadcast that lets you login to the device for troubleshooting purposes.

Wireless is critical infrastructure in my environment. If my drivers cannot use their handheld scanners to connect to the network for inventory then the company is losing money. With all of the resiliency features and ability to scale I never have to worry about whether people can actually get work done. I'll go weeks at a time without needing to even look at the Hive manager interface and when I do it's because I need to either provision a new AP or update a network policy. It is pretty much a "set it and forget it" product.

I can honestly say that I cannot find a single item where Aerohive needs to be improved. I have been a customer from pretty much the beginning so to see how they have evolved and grown is pretty amazing.

I have used Aerohive at two different companies between 2007 and now.

Aside from the typical learning curve that goes along with any new product I had no deployment issues.

In the early days there were some stability issues with the code, but they corrected them quickly. We had instances where the data plane on the AP's would randomly stop forwarding traffic which of course caused the wireless clients to not be able to reach the rest of the network.

Never. No controller = no bottleneck = no single point of failure

Customer service is top notch. If there have ever been non-technical issues with things such as Hive manager licensing they have always been right on top of things.

Tech support is hands down one of the best collection of individuals you'll ever deal with. The problem is that their product is so solid that I can't remember the last time I've had to interface with them.

I have personally used many different vendors’ products such as Trapeze, Aruba, and Cisco. Dealing with those solutions after having dealt with Aerohive was pure torture. I used to work for a Cisco Gold partner where our major client base was K-12. I dare you to try and get Bonjour or any other multicast based application to work with a Cisco WLAN. You can do it, but it is a painstaking experience. Every enterprise should be Aerohive in my opinion, but K-12 especially should be taking a serious look.

Initial setup is ridiculously easy. If you're going with the on-premise Hive manager then you install the OVA, get into the text-based setup, assign a hostname and network information, and then launch the web GUI. From there you are two minutes away from having a functioning wireless network. If you're going with the Hive Manager Online (HMOL) then it is even easier. The AP's find their own way to the Hive manager either via DHCP options or via a DNS lookup for their HMOL.

We implemented Aerohive in-house.

This is not something I have calculated at this point.

It has been a while, but I believe it was around 5k for the Hive manager virtual appliance and then the price of each AP which range from $400-$1100. Day to day cost is pretty much nothing other than when I need to provision a new AP or update a network policy. As I said before, I can go weeks at a time without even looking at it.

Yes, we looked at Aruba and Trapeze. The Trapeze folks almost got into a fist fight in the data center and the Aruba folks were so ridiculously arrogant I couldn't stand it.

If you're going to have a bake-off try Aerohive last because you won't want to take it out. Take this from someone who is about to sit the CCIE Route/Switch lab, just because it doesn't say Cisco doesn't mean it isn't top notch gear.

Since these APs are controller-less they are very dependable and easy to configure. Other features that add value to our institution include deployment planning tools, load-balancing, auto-channeling, auto-power, Cooperative Control Protocols, Firewalls, QoS, to mention a few.

Ease of use and features are its strongest points.

Sometimes, packing a wide array of feature into these APs might overtax them. They would benefit from creating more powerful APs (Processing-wise)

4 years

We started with a small deployment of 300 APs in 2010. Our campus now has ~1400 and we plan to expand to 2000 in the next 2 years.

When we installed the latest firmware versions on these APs, sometimes we encountered major/minor bugs that would force us to roll back until an appropriate patch was released. Also, with some bleeding-edge AC units we had some problems when they were under high client-loads were new clients would be unable to associate to the APs.

Not really. We simply had to buy a more powerful Hive Manager appliance when we went over the 1000 AP mark, but other than that, this product scales very easily.

I would rate it at 10 out of 10 as their staff is very polite with customers.

I would rate their TAC team at 9 out of 10 as some of their Tier 1 engineers needed more experience and/or training.

The initial setup is very easy. the APs automatically find our local Hive Manager and make it very straight-forward to configure.

Day to day cost is minimal, as these APs don't fail very often. The initial setp was a bit pricey as well as our expansion (if you calculate at around $1200 per newly deployed AP, including wired lines)

I'd highly recommend this product if they're looking for feature-rich APs that are easy to deploy & manage.

The HiveManager reporting features are extremely valuable for quick glance at network and application usage of your wireless network.

Aerohive Wireless solutions have allowed us to take the guess work out of managing a wireless network. The “single pane of glass” view into your wireless network allows you to manage all of your access points and clients in one location, greatly reducing the amount of time it may take to isolate and resolve issues.

The initial learning curve when first deploying Aerohive is less than some larger competitors, but still significant when compared to other cloud controlled wireless products such as Meraki. Ease of setup and deployment, as well as tasks such as application access management, bandwidth throttling, and QoS could be greatly simplified.

3 years.

Some initial reading and/or training is likely required before successfully deploying Aerohive Wireless products, however once you have a firm grasp of where things live in the HiveManager issues should be few and far between.

We have not had any issues with stability or the hardware itself. Some issues were seen with older wireless standards (B/G) and needed to be addressed by modifying radio strengths, etc..

None so far.

I believe I’ve called Aerohive support 3 or 4 times and each time I had someone on the phone in less than 5 minutes. No hoops to jump through like Cisco and no basic tier 1 style questions. Just good engineers ready to help.

The level of technical support is excellent.

I’ve used both Cisco and Meraki extensively and have found Aerohive to offer the best mix between stable hardware and software and ease of setup, deployment, and management.

Initial setup can be more complex than a home office or small business wireless solution and does require some initial training or reading at the very least. It’s less complex than something like Cisco WLC.

I’ve implemented Aerohive several times both in house and as a IT Consultant for small to mid size businesses.

Hard to estimate with a wireless network solution, but time saved by keeping your workers connected to your network instead of running down obscure connectivity issues with SOHO solutions is time well spent.

All in, our deployment was under 5K for a medium size office of about 75. There really is no day to day cost associated with using Aerohive. It’s been cruising along without issue since deployment, with minimal time spent making configuration tweaks and updating firmware on occasion.

Yes. Meraki, Cisco, and Arbua networks were all evaluated.

For any wireless network implementation, a wireless survey of the space is key to a successful deployment. As for Aerohive specifically, stay away from older B/G devices if you can keep them off your network, and keep the radio power as low as you can manage to avoid issues with surrounding wireless networks…especially in congested areas/cities.