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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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers.
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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)

HiFive to this good WiFi

Incentivized
Gurpreet Singh
Junior Network Engineer in Information Technology at TMX Group (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Centralized Management
  • High availability

Cons

  • GUI Performance and Usability
  • Slow Feature Rollout

Return on Investment

  • Improved network reliability
  • easier managemen

Alternatives Considered

Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points and Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center

Adaptable and affordable.

Incentivized
Stephen EpleyView profile
Information Technology Manager in Information Technology at City of Bowling Green (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers have helped us modernize our wireless infrastructure by give us additional flexability in configuration.

Pros

  • Management interfaces
  • Adaptability
  • Flexible

Cons

  • New configuration could be improved with a guided mode

Return on Investment

  • Network segmentation and security advances over previous hardware

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller

Other Software Used

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers are a great investment

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

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use 22 Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers in our organization for ~10K APs. They are set up in HA mode and have been great to use so far. The management GUI is intuitive and full featured. They have a nice tie in to Catalyst Center for an overall view of the entire network.

Pros

  • Stable
  • Full Featured
  • Intuitive

Cons

  • Tie in to Catalyst Center has some gaps in knowledge
  • It would be nice to have an automatic way to set up site tags
  • It is a little slow at times

Return on Investment

  • Faster Mean Time to Resolution
  • Quicker deployments
  • More bugs that you would expect on Cisco Recommended Code

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Catalyst Switches

Other Software Used

Cisco ThousandEyes

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