Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers vs. HPE Aruba Networking Operating System

I think any size organization can benefit from them. The smaller "L" models work well for a smaller organization and of course, the same answer for the larger platforms. The failover/redundancy options are quite nice and the unified setup and UI is always nice for consistency.

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Aruba Wireless works quite well and is stable for enterprise. Once it's running, it works. Once you have it set up, you don't normally need to go in and make changes. Aruba is particularly good on pushing clients to use 5ghz (they say they use some kind of a proprietary algorithm). It may not be appropriate for smaller businesses due to cost and complexity

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• I think the updates are great. ISSU upgrading code is fantastic. I think the speed with which CAPWAP converges or reconverges, I think the redundancy mechanisms for roaming APs to other controllers is very good. I think overall, getting away from more of a monolithic processor where subprocesses handle what they call the WNCD tasks, I think fundamentally is an improvement in performance.
• The radioactive tracing, all of the troubleshooting and all of the logging and all of the importing and exporting features for logging and analytics within the controller itself is really, really good compared to the predecessor AireOS.

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• Wireless Access
• Security/Role Management
• Firewalling
• Centralized Management

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• The only downside I would say is the GUI performance is a little bit slow, even with a newer 9800, performance still lags a bit even compared to the previous generations. So I would like to see that improved. But aside from that, that's really the only issue that we have with it.

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• Documentation on Aruba website is very lacking
• Support is hit-or-miss - they may waste a lot of time before you get to someone who has a solution
• Some configuration items are very non-intuitive

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Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution

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It's not simple, but this is the result of being very deeply configurable

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Due to our HA set up we have always managed to access our wireless networks without problems, when issues occur. When we have lost access to the GUI, due to internal network problems, console access is always welcomed and brings with it the normal Cisco CLI syntax. From previous versions of CLI, it is now a lot simpler and reflects other Cisco products, making it easier to troubleshoot and navigate when necessary.

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Monitoring is very good Seamless integration with Cisco ISE RRM configuration very easy. It has REST API support IOS-XE is very powerful operation system. Multicasting and mDNS features are really good and very easy to configure. It supports Pyats and Genie so getting constructed data from python script calls very helpful.

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When it's a config issue, TAC is usually useful. If it's some bug and BU needs to be involved, it might take forever.

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You need to understand wifi basics

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Ubiquiti WLAN is very much a consumer platform. It is not production ready, it is buggy, it has issues. It is cheaper than Cisco, but you get what you pay for. Aruba doesn't integrate nicely with our existing largely Cisco based networks, so when time came to replace AireOS, the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers came out on top.

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Aruba does quite a good job with GUI configuration, especially with AOS 8 - something that Cisco struggles with (maybe they came up with something new now). Aruba can also easily scale. While not on the same level, Ubiquiti has a good GUI but is lacking a good standard controller - users have to stand their own.

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There are different vesrions for different requirements, there's HA as well.

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• Positive impacts, yeah, is good to have a central location to control all these profiles for different countries and locations. And the drawback, like I said to you really because of the too many integrations that have a dependency on the software version. For example, Cisco ONE for Access have certain software that can run through and then this scatter center need to make sure it's working with the others APS version that is currently working. And we also, the Cisco Catalyst Center also have some kind another version of software that you need to support this controller. So it's like two tier three tiers of the software version that we need to match. Then only it can work.

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• Good return on investment in terms of a working wireless network for thousands of users
• However, troubleshooting and support may be difficult
• Good integration with ClearPass

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