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Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Score9.2 out of 10

148 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers?

The Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.

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Who Buys & Uses Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Reviews

What users are saying about Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers.
View all Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers reviews

Pros

  • Centralized management and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI)
  • Robust and advanced troubleshooting tools
  • High availability and redundancy features for continuous operations

Cons

  • Slow GUI performance and lack of filtering options in certain displays
  • Frequent software bugs requiring code upgrades or reloads
  • Limitations in data table views, such as truncated lists and insufficient filtering

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Feedback

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers at one of our site. It supports WiFi 6 and all catalyst Access points. It supports ISSU It comes with more security features and has lot more capabilities than traditional Aironet WLC.

Pros

  • WiFi6
  • ISSU
  • Troubleshooting

Cons

  • Managing via Catalyst Centre

Return on Investment

  • Great Wifi experience as end user.
  • Minimum downtime with ISSU Upgrade

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 3504 WLAN Controller

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)

Cisco 9800 Platform

Incentivized
Dominic Romandi
Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at HCA (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use a dedicated pair at each hospital, with some remote anchoring to other sites within a "market" or outside if need be for guest traffic on dedicated internet circuits. The centralization and unified management interface has been fantastic, and the automated setup integration with DNAC is an added bonus.

Pros

  • unified management and operation interface(s)
  • automated setup integration with DNAC
  • built in troubleshooting tools to assist all levels of engineers

Cons

  • The biggest issues we have had have been software related. Requiring code upgrades or reloads to fix an unfixable problem.
  • Some of the troubleshooting utilities aren't perfectly clear as to what theyre doing or how to set them up or what to expect results wise or resource wise.
  • I think there is a lack of filtering in certain displays where you cannot use the "contains" option for certain device type filtering. But those options should be universal in all views.

Return on Investment

  • It has made management much easier
  • introducing new devices into our ecosystem is far simplified and saves many hours in the initial setup and troubleshooting any quirks
  • The anchor floating has enabled additional circuit savings.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller and Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller

Other Software Used

OneDrive, ServiceNow IT Operations Management, Atlassian Confluence

Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Review

Incentivized
Daniel Cummins
Network Engineer II in Information Technology at The University of Kansas Health System (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's the central controller. There's actually two HA systems. So each data center has a wireless controller and about 2000 APs converged to each one, and that number's going to grow to about 3000 APs per controller and they're used in an Active-Active N+1 setup. So all of our wireless is done in central switching. We don't do any flex connect or local switching. So all wireless traffic converges to just these two boxes.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • The big one for me is tables. When you go to look at an inventory of an AP monitoring or a client monitoring, it truncates the list to only a hundred items in the view of this table, even if there's thousands or tens of thousands of entries. And so if you go to sort a column, it's only sorting the portion of the first 100 within the table view. That is a big shortcoming of the tool. Being able to filter and sort the live data as it's happening and the live traffic and interactions as it's happening is enormously helpful for a wireless engineer. Exporting that process with any kind of delay defeats the purpose of analyzing real-time issues. So being able to troubleshoot and review data at a glance is a huge lacking problem on this platform compared to its predecessor, the AireOS modern UI, or there's the classic view and the new view under the modern UI incorporated in like 8.3. It had a sortable table that let you filter and look at everything. So if I want to look at only the clients that are connected at one particular 8 0 2 11 protocol type, I can do that. If I want to sort it by data rates, I can do that. If I want to sort it by interference or SNR, I can do that on AireOS. I cannot do that on the 9800, and it is a big hurdle to being able to answer questions proficiently and quickly.

Return on Investment

  • It is a fair replacement for the 8540. It is mostly capable of being a one-to-one replacement, and so I would put it as a very net positive product. I don't think that there were a lot of pains in migrating from one platform to the other if again, you knew what you're doing in your design and able to make all that work predictably. And so very positive. I think overall it's been a very good solution of the one option out there. It was a very good solution.

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Infoblox DDI (BloxOne)

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers review.

Incentivized
Sebastian KozankiewiczView profile
Voice and Network Architect in Information Technology at NORMA Group (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers replaced Cisco Wireless Airos. With the implementation of SD-WAN and improved reliability of connections from branches to DC, we eliminated local wireless controllers and consolidated all capwap connection to controller located in the DataCenter. WiFI service is crucial for us, in some locations we have reduced cable connections and we use "Wireless First". We have increased the number of Access Points to also connect IoT and IIoT devices located in our factories to the network. We test automatic robots in factories that use our WiFi network to communicate. The WiFi controller works in SSO mode and we want to use the controller installed in the Cloud as a "backup".

Pros

  • Easy configuration based on profiles and tags
  • Patching controller and Access Points with HA - no downtime for service
  • Managed by Catalyst Center

Cons

  • Azure cloud is not supported. Issue with the communication with radius sever.

Return on Investment

  • Reducing AP license costs - controllers check licenses in the Cloud. We purchase licenses globally for organizations.
  • Lower support and service costs, we have reduced the number of controllers.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers

Other Software Used

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Check Point 4000 Appliances, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless LAN Controller Review

Incentivized
Suhairiikmal Baharudin
Principal Network Engineer in Information Technology at Amway IT Services Sdn Bhd (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

So we use it as a central and we do have regional base of deployments and then this is more likely constantly consolidating all this wireless controller. So we have many remote offices. And then connecting to this, so all the access point is different countries is connecting to central controllers.

Pros

  • It is good kind of design with the multiple flow profiles and also location base whereby the long very, I think the traditional controller doesn't have this, so we need to have that specific. Every day is getting the same profile but this have a little bit difference. It's very good with the site tagging and also designing all the location-based requirements.

Cons

  • You should have one single license that can cover all. Otherwise you need to have a very, very advanced license that only can see full visibility for this. And most of the times you need to integrate it with others. We do have the catalyst center to manage this controllers and it requires a certain license to run in so that we can see troubleshooting is easy for the end users. We can see all the end to ends. It should have maybe one single license that you can apply for everything. So instead of to have separate product at different license, but we we're integrating together.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365

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