Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Mike Beane]

Rob,

Look for a thread with the subject "[WIRELESS-LAN] Update on our Aruba
solution" which I believe was the continuation of this discussion  (someone
correct me if I am wrong).

Regards,
Mike







On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 10:35 AM Rob Harris 
wrote:

> This was a very active thread that really got a lot of attention. To the
> OP and main contributors, how is everything now? Anyone willing to drop an
> update?
>
>
>
> (We’re still happy with our 315s, we’re running 8.5.0.5 and it’s basically
> stable. Any issues we encountered they were very quick to help us resolve)..
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> *On Behalf Of *Turner, Ryan H
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:16 AM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
>
>
>
> All:
>
>
>
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000
> access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and
> downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I
> am considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed,
> another one crops up.
>
>
>
> The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them
> deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are
> connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they
> are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their
> phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.
> Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and
> seeing a problem resolve.  Normally, if the users disconnect then
> reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting
> in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on this problem with them for
> months.  It always seems as though we have to prove there is a real issue.
> I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9
> times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m
> extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train
> that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s
> credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around
> February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba
> bought back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I
> thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would
> be fixed by the time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.
>
>
>
> So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away
> from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are
> other bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the
> switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted,
> what were your motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of
> course, this is a great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we
> have 3 choices….  Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped
> them for bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this
> makes sense), something from Juniper (Mist).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan Turner
>
> Head of Networking
>
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>
> +1 919 445 0113 Office
>
> +1 919 274 7926 Mobile
>
> r...@unc.edu
>
>
>
> **
> Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire
> community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the
> message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply.
> Additional participation and subscription information can be found at
> https://www.educause.edu/community
>
> **
> Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire
> community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the
> message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply.
> Additional participation and subscription information can be found at
> https://www.educause.edu/community
>

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Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Hurt,Trenton W.]

I also have majority of config at lower folder levels than the managed network 
level.  And with airgroup from 8.2 on you have the airgroup profiles that 
“should” allow you to override config from managed network level.  For airgroup 
tac escalation folks instructed me to do all the airgroup config at the managed 
network level.I’ve done that and now airgroup servers are discovered and 
show up in mm gui and cli.  It’s just now clients can’t discover the airgroup 
servers.  This is shown in show datapath filtering for specific client and 
5353.  The flags are 0o which shows the openflow duplicate error.

I’ve been told there is a patch and custom build are being worked now.



Trent Hurt

University of Louisville


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Erick.Matherly 

Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 5:07:40 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?


@Trenton did you just have to apply the AirGroup Config at the Managed Network 
node for Airgroup to work? We have a subfolder underneath MN that we have 
always applied our centralized config to.



We are also experiencing airgroup issues…



We have a cluster of 7210s that we upgraded from 8.3.0.5 to 8.5.0.3 back in 
October after purchasing a number of 515s to deploy. The upgrade went bad when 
one of the MDs failed to upgrade. We got TAC assistance to downgrade the MD 
that did upgrade, re-build the Cluster, and then perform the upgrade once 
again. Testing looked good afterwards and the cluster was stable so we went 
ahead and deployed the 515s.



Unfortunately, we neglected to test airgroup after the upgrade. It was a few 
weeks before we were notified that it was no longer working. After a few weeks 
of back and forth with TAC (5-6 4+ hour calls with lots of packet captures, 
datapath traces, and tech dumps) Configuration was verified and the ticket was 
kicked up to Engineering as a potential bug. Unfortunately, it is still sitting 
with Engineering and it sounds like it will be a while before resolution.



This has definitely been the most frustrating case I have ever had with Aruba. 
That being said, we have received phenomenal customer support over the years. 
Our SEs have been top notch as well. We are all in with Aruba for Switching, 
Wireless, ClearPass, and Airwave. I have never had any finger pointing because 
they can always pull in a switching or clearpass Engineer if they do not 
believe wireless is the issue.





[cid:image006.jpg@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.trnty.edu%2F=02%7C01%7CTrent.hurt%40LOUISVILLE.EDU%7C0acde25a8137460510b008d7993e302a%7Cdd246e4a54344e158ae391ad9797b209%7C0%7C0%7C637146364688040840=NECJ2cdBXhEzSlXgVxTEHPpWmwmdJmhVYwmcVMFT%2F58%3D=0>

Erick Matherly

Network Administrator | Trinity Christian College

6601 West College Drive | Palos Heights, Illinois 60463

[cid:image007.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ftrinitychristiancollege=02%7C01%7CTrent.hurt%40LOUISVILLE.EDU%7C0acde25a8137460510b008d7993e302a%7Cdd246e4a54344e158ae391ad9797b209%7C0%7C0%7C637146364688040840=kme1IykGIhaRQcw2VfaBv7%2Fj%2Fus0Oqj8%2BJVTaW%2B96ck%3D=0>[cid:image008.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Ftrinitytroll=02%7C01%7CTrent.hurt%40LOUISVILLE.EDU%7C0acde25a8137460510b008d7993e302a%7Cdd246e4a54344e158ae391ad9797b209%7C0%7C0%7C637146364688050837=EmIiPBQO1NeOPDQRf7zob7yYD3bizZWEJiAnUMh8cfI%3D=0>[cid:image009.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Ftrinitytrolls%2F=02%7C01%7CTrent.hurt%40LOUISVILLE.EDU%7C0acde25a8137460510b008d7993e302a%7Cdd246e4a54344e158ae391ad9797b209%7C0%7C0%7C637146364688050837=9hdBLbb7zPXG66QjiiRzdK8NQpkugEQyE3NdY660OLM%3D=0>[cid:image010.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Ftrinity-christian-college=02%7C01%7CTrent.hurt%40LOUISVILLE.EDU%7C0acde25a8137460510b008d7993e302a%7Cdd246e4a54344e158ae391ad9797b209%7C0%7C0%7C637146364688050837=ECgPmCp77fHWr0ZgKtVpJlRFMkKJpSw%2B0QyUcOS0blA%3D=0>

708.239.4818  | erick.mathe...@trnty.edu<mailto:erick.mathe...@trnty.edu>









From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Hurt,Trenton W.
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 2:04 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?



For you other 3 bugs any related to airgroup?  I’m having airgroup issue with 
8.5.x.  Running in centralized mode with no airgroup profiles.  Working with 
TAC they found that the Airgroup config has to be done from /md level and can’t 
override at lower folder levels.  We got past t

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Amel Caldwell]

Hi Keith and Michael—

That is correct.  We recently experienced a meltdown on our campus  due to this 
very issue.  We had to enable cpsec and that seems to have fixed the issue then 
snow hit our area and we have not hit anywhere near the normal level of traffic 
so we are, at this point, “cautiously optimistic”  .  I don’t consider this a 
permanent fix and have been assured the fix to place PAPI traffic into separate 
queues will be in 8.3 and 8.5 code trains.

I would warn that you need to be careful because this causes control traffic 
from the AP to be sourced through the IPSEC tunnel and over the controller 
uplink.  If you have IP Spoofing deployed then you will have to allow APs’ IP 
traffic.

Amel

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Miller, Keith C" 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 6:40 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Hi Michael,

Currently we do not and yes, that is the situation as I understand it. The PAPI 
traffic between APs and the controllers use the same queue that the controller 
to controller heartbeats use. Enabling CPSec moves that traffic traffic to a 
different queue.

We’re expecting to enable CPSec in Resnet today.

Regards,
Keith

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Michael Davis 
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 3:56 PM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Do you run CPSEC on your APs?   I've heard that non-CPSEC AP connections can
contend with the controller cluster heatbeats and cause disconnect.

On 1/14/20 3:37 PM, Miller, Keith C wrote:
Hi Trent,

No not related to AirGroup, but we’ve had problems with AirGroup server leaks 
in the past on 8.4 – One of the solutions was to configure AirGroup in 
centralized mode at the group level.

The other problems are related to the 515s and we are suffering from cluster 
disconnects in a few of our 8.x environments for what seems to be varying 
reasons.

Regards,
Keith





--

 Mike Davis

 IT - University of Delaware  - 302.831.8756

 Newark, DE  19716 Email da...@udel.edu<mailto:da...@udel.edu>

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
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list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
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Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
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Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Miller, Keith C]

Hi Michael,

Currently we do not and yes, that is the situation as I understand it. The PAPI 
traffic between APs and the controllers use the same queue that the controller 
to controller heartbeats use. Enabling CPSec moves that traffic traffic to a 
different queue.

We’re expecting to enable CPSec in Resnet today.

Regards,
Keith

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Michael Davis 
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 3:56 PM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Do you run CPSEC on your APs?   I've heard that non-CPSEC AP connections can
contend with the controller cluster heatbeats and cause disconnect.

On 1/14/20 3:37 PM, Miller, Keith C wrote:
Hi Trent,

No not related to AirGroup, but we’ve had problems with AirGroup server leaks 
in the past on 8.4 – One of the solutions was to configure AirGroup in 
centralized mode at the group level.

The other problems are related to the 515s and we are suffering from cluster 
disconnects in a few of our 8.x environments for what seems to be varying 
reasons.

Regards,
Keith




--

 Mike Davis

 IT - University of Delaware  - 302.831.8756

 Newark, DE  19716 Email da...@udel.edu<mailto:da...@udel.edu>

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Erick . Matherly]

@Trenton did you just have to apply the AirGroup Config at the Managed Network 
node for Airgroup to work? We have a subfolder underneath MN that we have 
always applied our centralized config to.

We are also experiencing airgroup issues...

We have a cluster of 7210s that we upgraded from 8.3.0.5 to 8.5.0.3 back in 
October after purchasing a number of 515s to deploy. The upgrade went bad when 
one of the MDs failed to upgrade. We got TAC assistance to downgrade the MD 
that did upgrade, re-build the Cluster, and then perform the upgrade once 
again. Testing looked good afterwards and the cluster was stable so we went 
ahead and deployed the 515s.

Unfortunately, we neglected to test airgroup after the upgrade. It was a few 
weeks before we were notified that it was no longer working. After a few weeks 
of back and forth with TAC (5-6 4+ hour calls with lots of packet captures, 
datapath traces, and tech dumps) Configuration was verified and the ticket was 
kicked up to Engineering as a potential bug. Unfortunately, it is still sitting 
with Engineering and it sounds like it will be a while before resolution.

This has definitely been the most frustrating case I have ever had with Aruba. 
That being said, we have received phenomenal customer support over the years. 
Our SEs have been top notch as well. We are all in with Aruba for Switching, 
Wireless, ClearPass, and Airwave. I have never had any finger pointing because 
they can always pull in a switching or clearpass Engineer if they do not 
believe wireless is the issue.


[cid:image006.jpg@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<http://www.trnty.edu/>
Erick Matherly
Network Administrator | Trinity Christian College
6601 West College Drive | Palos Heights, Illinois 60463
[cid:image007.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://www.facebook.com/trinitychristiancollege>[cid:image008.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://twitter.com/trinitytroll>[cid:image009.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://www.instagram.com/trinitytrolls/>[cid:image010.png@01D4962B.62F5E7F0]<https://www.linkedin.com/company/trinity-christian-college>
708.239.4818  | erick.mathe...@trnty.edu<mailto:erick.mathe...@trnty.edu>




From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Hurt,Trenton W.
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 2:04 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

For you other 3 bugs any related to airgroup?  I'm having airgroup issue with 
8.5.x.  Running in centralized mode with no airgroup profiles.  Working with 
TAC they found that the Airgroup config has to be done from /md level and can't 
override at lower folder levels.  We got past this but now face issue with 
clients not being marked as airgroup users.  If you do show datapath for a user 
filtering on 5353 the Flags for this will 0o if your hitting the bug.  Mine has 
been recreated in tac lab and now in development hands.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>On
 Behalf Of Turner, Ryan H
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 2:35 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have Aruba engineers on site.  They've experienced the issue many times 
since they have been here.  So I am confident that something will be done about 
this specific bug.  We have about 3 more bugs of varying criticality they are 
looking at.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>On
 Behalf Of James Andrewartha
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 3:29 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

On the specific bug that Ryan is talking about, I was speaking today with a 
local partner who was experiencing the bug as well (and I believe has contacted 
Ryan offline), and their workaround was to change the SSIDs to bridge mode. We 
already made that change for unrelated reasons* during our final week ofPoC 
testing which probably explains why we didn't see it recently.

I will say that Aruba support seems to be very quick to point fingers at the 
rest of your infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, RADIUSetc) and so you have to prove 
it's working, even though it's not been an issue up until the point of the bug. 
I can understand this attitude but granting a little bit of trust that we have 
our environment configured correctly since it was working fine with another 
vendor would be nice.

*Airgroup wasn't controllingAirtames correctly, I have a TAC session to gather 
traces scheduled for tomorrow

--

James Andrewartha

Network & Projects Engineer

Christ Church Grammar School

Claremont, Western Australia

Ph. (08) 9442 1757

Mob. 0424 160 877
On 10/1/20 5:01 pm, James Andr

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Michael Davis]

Do you run CPSEC on your APs?   I've heard that non-CPSEC AP connections can
contend with the controller cluster heatbeats and cause disconnect.

On 1/14/20 3:37 PM, Miller, Keith C wrote:


Hi Trent,

No not related to AirGroup, but we’ve had problems with AirGroup 
server leaks in the past on 8.4 – One of the solutions was to 
configure AirGroup in centralized mode at the group level.


The other problems are related to the 515s and we are suffering from 
cluster disconnects in a few of our 8.x environments for what seems to 
be varying reasons.


Regards,

Keith




--
 Mike Davis
 IT - University of Delaware  - 302.831.8756
 Newark, DE  19716 Email da...@udel.edu


**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Miller, Keith C]

Hi Trent,

No not related to AirGroup, but we’ve had problems with AirGroup server leaks 
in the past on 8.4 – One of the solutions was to configure AirGroup in 
centralized mode at the group level.

The other problems are related to the 515s and we are suffering from cluster 
disconnects in a few of our 8.x environments for what seems to be varying 
reasons.

Regards,
Keith

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Hurt,Trenton W." 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 3:03 PM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

For you other 3 bugs any related to airgroup?  I’m having airgroup issue with 
8.5.x.  Running in centralized mode with no airgroup profiles.  Working with 
TAC they found that the Airgroup config has to be done from /md level and can’t 
override at lower folder levels.  We got past this but now face issue with 
clients not being marked as airgroup users.  If you do show datapath for a user 
filtering on 5353 the Flags for this will 0o if your hitting the bug.  Mine has 
been recreated in tac lab and now in development hands.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
On Behalf Of Turner, Ryan H
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 2:35 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have Aruba engineers on site.  They’ve experienced the issue many times 
since they have been here.  So I am confident that something will be done about 
this specific bug.  We have about 3 more bugs of varying criticality they are 
looking at.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>On
 Behalf Of James Andrewartha
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 3:29 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

On the specific bug that Ryan is talking about, I was speaking today with a 
local partner who was experiencing the bug as well (and I believe has contacted 
Ryan offline), and their workaround was to change the SSIDs to bridge mode. We 
already made that change for unrelated reasons* during our final week ofPoC 
testing which probably explains why we didn't see it recently.

I will say that Aruba support seems to be very quick to point fingers at the 
rest of your infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, RADIUSetc) and so you have to prove 
it's working, even though it's not been an issue up until the point of the bug. 
I can understand this attitude but granting a little bit of trust that we have 
our environment configured correctly since it was working fine with another 
vendor would be nice.

*Airgroup wasn't controllingAirtames correctly, I have a TAC session to gather 
traces scheduled for tomorrow

--

James Andrewartha

Network & Projects Engineer

Christ Church Grammar School

Claremont, Western Australia

Ph. (08) 9442 1757

Mob. 0424 160 877
On 10/1/20 5:01 pm, James Andrewartha wrote:
Hi all,

I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing up a 
rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a nearly 6 
monthPoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low occurrence and 
unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when connected to our Extreme 
Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix this bug (and it definitely was a 
client bug, their debug traces showed the Surfaces dropping BAR packets from 
the AP), so instead I hope they can fix the new bug we found the Surfaces have 
with Aruba APs, which is low-impact but occurs frequently (several times a 
minute) and so is highly reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below, but I 
had also seen the Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity for 5 minutes 
or so, HE was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot this in Airwave, there 
will be a period of no traffic transferred for the client. We didn't have any 
problem reports in the last few weeks of testing though, while running on 
8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed? The user group (Maths teachers) were very good 
in reporting issues, although not always in a timely fashion. Our new 
production install is running 8.5.0.5 but I'll probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 
before the teachers get back from summer holiday.

I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted that the 
support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team should be high on 
your consideration. ThePoC was a tortured process, definitely not helped by the 
fact that the partner's engineers were in another state, and the local Aruba SE 
had just left, and a new one wasn't hired until October or so. I've also found 
Aruba TAC to be not great in my brief experience with them, certainly not 
compared to 

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Hurt,Trenton W.]

For you other 3 bugs any related to airgroup?  I’m having airgroup issue with 
8.5.x.  Running in centralized mode with no airgroup profiles.  Working with 
TAC they found that the Airgroup config has to be done from /md level and can’t 
override at lower folder levels.  We got past this but now face issue with 
clients not being marked as airgroup users.  If you do show datapath for a user 
filtering on 5353 the Flags for this will 0o if your hitting the bug.  Mine has 
been recreated in tac lab and now in development hands.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
On Behalf Of Turner, Ryan H
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 2:35 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have Aruba engineers on site.  They’ve experienced the issue many times 
since they have been here.  So I am confident that something will be done about 
this specific bug.  We have about 3 more bugs of varying criticality they are 
looking at.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>On
 Behalf Of James Andrewartha
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 3:29 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

On the specific bug that Ryan is talking about, I was speaking today with a 
local partner who was experiencing the bug as well (and I believe has contacted 
Ryan offline), and their workaround was to change the SSIDs to bridge mode. We 
already made that change for unrelated reasons* during our final week ofPoC 
testing which probably explains why we didn't see it recently.

I will say that Aruba support seems to be very quick to point fingers at the 
rest of your infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, RADIUSetc) and so you have to prove 
it's working, even though it's not been an issue up until the point of the bug. 
I can understand this attitude but granting a little bit of trust that we have 
our environment configured correctly since it was working fine with another 
vendor would be nice.

*Airgroup wasn't controllingAirtames correctly, I have a TAC session to gather 
traces scheduled for tomorrow

--

James Andrewartha

Network & Projects Engineer

Christ Church Grammar School

Claremont, Western Australia

Ph. (08) 9442 1757

Mob. 0424 160 877
On 10/1/20 5:01 pm, James Andrewartha wrote:
Hi all,

I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing up a 
rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a nearly 6 
monthPoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low occurrence and 
unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when connected to our Extreme 
Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix this bug (and it definitely was a 
client bug, their debug traces showed the Surfaces dropping BAR packets from 
the AP), so instead I hope they can fix the new bug we found the Surfaces have 
with Aruba APs, which is low-impact but occurs frequently (several times a 
minute) and so is highly reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below, but I 
had also seen the Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity for 5 minutes 
or so, HE was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot this in Airwave, there 
will be a period of no traffic transferred for the client. We didn't have any 
problem reports in the last few weeks of testing though, while running on 
8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed? The user group (Maths teachers) were very good 
in reporting issues, although not always in a timely fashion. Our new 
production install is running 8.5.0.5 but I'll probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 
before the teachers get back from summer holiday.

I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted that the 
support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team should be high on 
your consideration. ThePoC was a tortured process, definitely not helped by the 
fact that the partner's engineers were in another state, and the local Aruba SE 
had just left, and a new one wasn't hired until October or so. I've also found 
Aruba TAC to be not great in my brief experience with them, certainly not 
compared to Extreme GTAC where I have on several occasions dealt directly with 
a developer, including one instance where we bisected code one evening to 
identify what change caused 2.4GHz to not work on AP3825s. The Aruba SE from 
another state did visit and let me know we should have 
setReversePathFwdCheckPromisc on the ESXi host, as we were seeing connectivity 
problems that were DHCP related, and that was the fix. It is documented, but 
only in the appendix of the install 
guidehttps://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/install-guide/virt-appl/appendix/nic-team-vswi.htm<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.arubanetworks.com%2Ftechdocs%2FArubaOS_85_Web_Help%2FCont

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

We have Aruba engineers on site.  They've experienced the issue many times 
since they have been here.  So I am confident that something will be done about 
this specific bug.  We have about 3 more bugs of varying criticality they are 
looking at.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of James Andrewartha
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 3:29 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

On the specific bug that Ryan is talking about, I was speaking today with a 
local partner who was experiencing the bug as well (and I believe has contacted 
Ryan offline), and their workaround was to change the SSIDs to bridge mode. We 
already made that change for unrelated reasons* during our final week of PoC 
testing which probably explains why we didn't see it recently.

I will say that Aruba support seems to be very quick to point fingers at the 
rest of your infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, RADIUS etc) and so you have to prove 
it's working, even though it's not been an issue up until the point of the bug. 
I can understand this attitude but granting a little bit of trust that we have 
our environment configured correctly since it was working fine with another 
vendor would be nice.

*Airgroup wasn't controlling Airtames correctly, I have a TAC session to gather 
traces scheduled for tomorrow

--

James Andrewartha

Network & Projects Engineer

Christ Church Grammar School

Claremont, Western Australia

Ph. (08) 9442 1757

Mob. 0424 160 877
On 10/1/20 5:01 pm, James Andrewartha wrote:
Hi all,

I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing up a 
rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a nearly 6 month 
PoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low occurrence and 
unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when connected to our Extreme 
Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix this bug (and it definitely was a 
client bug, their debug traces showed the Surfaces dropping BAR packets from 
the AP), so instead I hope they can fix the new bug we found the Surfaces have 
with Aruba APs, which is low-impact but occurs frequently (several times a 
minute) and so is highly reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below, but I 
had also seen the Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity for 5 minutes 
or so, HE was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot this in Airwave, there 
will be a period of no traffic transferred for the client. We didn't have any 
problem reports in the last few weeks of testing though, while running on 
8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed? The user group (Maths teachers) were very good 
in reporting issues, although not always in a timely fashion. Our new 
production install is running 8.5.0.5 but I'll probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 
before the teachers get back from summer holiday.

I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted that the 
support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team should be high on 
your consideration. The PoC was a tortured process, definitely not helped by 
the fact that the partner's engineers were in another state, and the local 
Aruba SE had just left, and a new one wasn't hired until October or so. I've 
also found Aruba TAC to be not great in my brief experience with them, 
certainly not compared to Extreme GTAC where I have on several occasions dealt 
directly with a developer, including one instance where we bisected code one 
evening to identify what change caused 2.4GHz to not work on AP3825s. The Aruba 
SE from another state did visit and let me know we should have set 
ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc on the ESXi host, as we were seeing connectivity 
problems that were DHCP related, and that was the fix. It is documented, but 
only in the appendix of the install guide 
https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/install-guide/virt-appl/appendix/nic-team-vswi.htm
 and not in the version that Google returns as the first result. That was 2 
months of frustration right there, and partly why for the production deployment 
I insisted on physical controllers (although the mobility master is a VM).

In terms of my (probably ill-informed) view of the competitive landscape, I've 
seen an Aerohive demo after Extreme acquired them and was very impressed, but 
unfortunately they couldn't get me demo APs in time to do testing before exams 
started. I believe WiNG isn't going away, given the large customers who use it. 
Their latest APs run the same wireless code and can be managed by 
Aerohive^WExtremeCloud IQ, WiNG or XCA, your choice. Cisco, well WLC is legacy 
and the 9800 series might be nice, but I'm yet to hear a good word about DNA 
Center. It's a beast, it needs 56 cores, 256GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, and it's 
not supported as a VM (although people have made it work 
http://blog.vpnv4.com/dna-center-esxi-installation-guide/ ). Meraki, I don't 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[James Andrewartha]

On the specific bug that Ryan is talking about, I was speaking today
with a local partner who was experiencing the bug as well (and I believe
has contacted Ryan offline), and their workaround was to change the
SSIDs to bridge mode. We already made that change for unrelated reasons*
during our final week of PoC testing which probably explains why we
didn't see it recently.

I will say that Aruba support seems to be very quick to point fingers at
the rest of your infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, RADIUS etc) and so you have
to prove it's working, even though it's not been an issue up until the
point of the bug. I can understand this attitude but granting a little
bit of trust that we have our environment configured correctly since it
was working fine with another vendor would be nice.

*Airgroup wasn't controlling Airtames correctly, I have a TAC session to
gather traces scheduled for tomorrow

-- 
James Andrewartha
Network & Projects Engineer
Christ Church Grammar School
Claremont, Western Australia
Ph. (08) 9442 1757
Mob. 0424 160 877

On 10/1/20 5:01 pm, James Andrewartha wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing
> up a rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a
> nearly 6 month PoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low
> occurrence and unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when
> connected to our Extreme Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix
> this bug (and it definitely was a client bug, their debug traces
> showed the Surfaces dropping BAR packets from the AP), so instead I
> hope they can fix the new bug we found the Surfaces have with Aruba
> APs, which is low-impact but occurs frequently (several times a
> minute) and so is highly reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below,
> but I had also seen the Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity
> for 5 minutes or so, HE was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot
> this in Airwave, there will be a period of no traffic transferred for
> the client. We didn't have any problem reports in the last few weeks
> of testing though, while running on 8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed?
> The user group (Maths teachers) were very good in reporting issues,
> although not always in a timely fashion. Our new production install is
> running 8.5.0.5 but I'll probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 before the
> teachers get back from summer holiday.
>
> I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted
> that the support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team
> should be high on your consideration. The PoC was a tortured process,
> definitely not helped by the fact that the partner's engineers were in
> another state, and the local Aruba SE had just left, and a new one
> wasn't hired until October or so. I've also found Aruba TAC to be not
> great in my brief experience with them, certainly not compared to
> Extreme GTAC where I have on several occasions dealt directly with a
> developer, including one instance where we bisected code one evening
> to identify what change caused 2.4GHz to not work on AP3825s. The
> Aruba SE from another state did visit and let me know we should have
> set ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc on the ESXi host, as we were seeing
> connectivity problems that were DHCP related, and that was the fix. It
> is documented, but only in the appendix of the install guide
> https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/install-guide/virt-appl/appendix/nic-team-vswi.htm
> and not in the version that Google returns as the first result. That
> was 2 months of frustration right there, and partly why for the
> production deployment I insisted on physical controllers (although the
> mobility master is a VM).
>
> In terms of my (probably ill-informed) view of the competitive
> landscape, I've seen an Aerohive demo after Extreme acquired them and
> was very impressed, but unfortunately they couldn't get me demo APs in
> time to do testing before exams started. I believe WiNG isn't going
> away, given the large customers who use it. Their latest APs run the
> same wireless code and can be managed by Aerohive^WExtremeCloud IQ,
> WiNG or XCA, your choice. Cisco, well WLC is legacy and the 9800
> series might be nice, but I'm yet to hear a good word about DNA
> Center. It's a beast, it needs 56 cores, 256GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD,
> and it's not supported as a VM (although people have made it work
> http://blog.vpnv4.com/dna-center-esxi-installation-guide/ ). Meraki, I
> don't like their business model. Aruba, well, we chose it in part
> because Microsoft use it internally and that prevents them blaming the
> wireless when we're getting them to fix their drivers. Mist I've never
> used, Ruckus have always had great wireless performance and with
> CloudPath are getting their authentication piece in order. Which
> brings me to another point, consider the vendor's other offerings like
> management systems and RADIUS servers. I've 

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Rob Harris]

What flavor of AP are you running? What are you doing for POE?

-Original Message-
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Jason Healy
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 2:24 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

I glanced away from my email and suddenly there are 50+ messages in this 
thread!  Late to the party but...

We're an Aruba shop now, having just gone through a vendor cage match last year 
for a full system replacement and installing over the summer.  While there have 
been some frustrations on the backend, they fortunately are not affecting the 
end user experience.

If I knew then what I did now I might have made a different choice.  However, I 
also believe that if I had selected another vendor I might have had a different 
set of issues that weren't foreseen during testing.  I've been through this so 
many vendors (not just Aruba) that I just don't have faith that a good 
experience can ever be counted on.

To give you an idea, here are the vendors that we were considering.  All came 
with positive recommendations from other schools, and all claimed that they 
were the best thing ever:

 - Meraki
 - Mist
 - Aerohive
 - Alcatel-Lucent
 - Ruckus
 - Aruba

Of those above, 2 didn't support IPv6-native deployment (e.g., IPv4 was 
required to install and manage the platform, which violated one of our 
requirements), an additional 2 didn't support IPv6 *at all* (as in, couldn't 
filter or ID client v6 traffic) and were disqualified.  2 had serious 
performance issues (throughput rates below 50% of other vendors).  Several had 
severe degradation using 802.3af PoE (we're not upgraded to 802.3at in most of 
our buildings).  In the end, all "cloud" solutions were disqualified due to 
cost, performance, or features.  If we hadn't tested vigorously I'd probably be 
here complaining about one of those vendors instead of Aruba because we might 
have gone with them.

Anyone who is curious on details for a particular vendor are welcome to email 
me off-list.  I got some great insights from people on this list when we were 
doing our evaluation and I'm happy to pay that forward.

Our specific Aruba issues were:

IPv6 deployment turned out not to work when clustered (we had only tested on a 
single controller), and GRE tunnels from the AP to the controller over v6 
caused a severe performance degradation (MTU would drop to 200 bytes in some 
instances).

We also have issues with their virtual controller not being compatible with our 
KVM environment.  I fully recognize that this may be a quirk in our 
environment, but TAC's final response was essentially "if you aren't running 
the EXACT flavor of linux (centos), kernel version, KVM version, and base 
hardware specs, we won't help you".  That's a lot different than the sales 
promise of "of course it will work on your KVM environment".

HP is "working with us" and I've finally gotten a little sympathy from the 
account manager, but other than that I'm not aware of any steps to resolve 
these issues (for example, they won't open an official case to track the IPv6 
problems).  We're a very small shop, so I feel like we don't have much clout, 
but at the same time it sounds like even the big schools have problems.

Jason
**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
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and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

  *   "The new announced "E" variant with access to the 6 GHz space and the 14 
additional 80 MHz channels. All of those pre-11ax AP's are probably obsolete, 
and we'll have 11ax clients that can't access those channels, making use of 
them challenging despite the obvious benefit.

I don't view it this way.  It will be years before we can reliably count on 
clients to support the new frequency.  Until then, those new channels (for me) 
would only be used in high density environments where we overlap a lot of 
coverage.

So everyone is clear...  The issue (really for me) was not the use of ax.  It 
was the response time to numerous issues.  I cherry picked the one .ax issue, 
but we have others that we also consider critical that have nothing to do with 
ax.

Also, I feel it is fair to let everyone know that I had a conversation with 
senior leadership at Aruba yesterday.  They are reacting positively to this 
thread, and I hope to have positive feedback on progress in the not too distant 
future.

Ryan
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Jeffrey D. Sessler
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 12:54 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

I try to remind myself that EDU's (Higher ed in particular) are outliers. We 
want to buy the cutting-edge WiFi technology, but at the same time, we have the 
most diverse of environments that will absolutely cause every lurking bug or 
compatibility issue to come out of the shadows.

While it would be nice, vendors will never stop releasing technology before 
it's time. You can't have one vendor release pre 11ax and not expect others to 
respond. It's the nature of the beast.  I have a Nighthawk rax120 11ax AP at 
home (Qualcomm chipset), and it was only in the last few weeks that they 
released updated radio code from Qualcomm to make it usable with most legacy 
devices.

Keep in mind that those initial enterprise 11ax AP's are built using "off the 
shelf" chipsets, be it Broadcom, Qualcomm, Quantenna, or Marvell,  and every AP 
vendor is at the mercy of those chipset vendors for radio-code updates. Be it 
Cisco, Aruba, or other, if there is a radio bug, they are in the queue waiting 
for those fixes. Using Cisco as an example, the 9115 and 9117 use "off the 
shelf" chipsets - I believe Broadcom in one, and Qualcomm in the other. It's 
when you get to Cisco's 9120 and 9130 that you get custom chipsets with Cisco 
having the ability to fix radio code without waiting on a chipset vendor. Those 
AP's are more expensive, but fixes should presumably be faster.

Two other rubs with 11ax.

  *   The new announced "E" variant with access to the 6 GHz space and the 14 
additional 80 MHz channels. All of those pre-11ax AP's are probably obsolete, 
and we'll have 11ax clients that can't access those channels, making use of 
them challenging despite the obvious benefit.
  *   For pre 11ax AP's based on Qualcomm chipsets, they'll never be WiFi 6 
certified because the chipset can't do OFDMA on the uplink.

Jeff



From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Friday, January 10, 2020 at 9:09 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
> "To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet."

I 100% agree with that sentiment.

At the same time, I can imagine the response an Aruba or Cisco would get for 
waiting to offer those access points. Even offering the AP alongside official 
guidance to disable the feature would leave them in a bad place.

The problem is our network teams are now the ones left holding the potato.

[Image removed by sender.]

Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
402.363.5603
jcoeho...@york.edu<mailto:jcoeho...@york.edu>
Please contact helpd...@york.edu<mailto:helpd...@york.edu> for technical 
assistance.

The mission of York College is to transform lives through Christ-centered 
education and to equip students for lifelong service to God, family, and society


On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:16 AM Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:
Hi Norman,

To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet. I know that 
doesn't touch your question, and we all have our own "you do what you gotta do" 
realities.

Thanks for reading through that long post.

-Lee

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<http://its.syr.edu>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<http://syr.edu>


-Original Message-
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

The issues we are seeing having nothing to do with a client being ax capable or 
not, so we’re clear.  I don’t think you are saying that, but so we are clear.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Kristijan Jerkan
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 12:42 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?


Question: Do those of You who experience this frustration in scale have reason 
to suspect compatibility issues between .ax-Aruba-code/features to be a root 
cause?



We don‘t notice significant .ax client adoption. (being an Aruba shop, but not 
in scale). AFIK even a lage scale event like the 36c3 (>10k peak nerds on ~300 
APs) saw only a dozen of .ax-clients.



From an operationaI standpoint I absolutly feel for You, but I do wonder if You 
had that discussion with the vendor (and if so, how it went).

We probably all agree with Lee on „prod is not suitable for unadequate inhouse 
tests, dear [whatever] vendor“.



Am 09.01.2020 um 21:34 schrieb Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>>:

We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 8.0.0.5, but 
we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the holidays.  Power 
was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some reason, APs associated 
to the controller in this building did not fail over to the other site.  We are 
going to be testing this scenario again next week by yanking the power to 
confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.

Ryan


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

What version of 8.5?

We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and 535s.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a 
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices….  
Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), 
something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), 
something from Juniper (Mist).

Thanks,
Ryan Turner
Head of Networking
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 445 0113 Office
+1 919 274 7926 M

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Jeffrey D. Sessler]

I try to remind myself that EDU’s (Higher ed in particular) are outliers. We 
want to buy the cutting-edge WiFi technology, but at the same time, we have the 
most diverse of environments that will absolutely cause every lurking bug or 
compatibility issue to come out of the shadows.

While it would be nice, vendors will never stop releasing technology before 
it’s time. You can’t have one vendor release pre 11ax and not expect others to 
respond. It’s the nature of the beast.  I have a Nighthawk rax120 11ax AP at 
home (Qualcomm chipset), and it was only in the last few weeks that they 
released updated radio code from Qualcomm to make it usable with most legacy 
devices.

Keep in mind that those initial enterprise 11ax AP’s are built using “off the 
shelf” chipsets, be it Broadcom, Qualcomm, Quantenna, or Marvell,  and every AP 
vendor is at the mercy of those chipset vendors for radio-code updates. Be it 
Cisco, Aruba, or other, if there is a radio bug, they are in the queue waiting 
for those fixes. Using Cisco as an example, the 9115 and 9117 use “off the 
shelf” chipsets – I believe Broadcom in one, and Qualcomm in the other. It’s 
when you get to Cisco’s 9120 and 9130 that you get custom chipsets with Cisco 
having the ability to fix radio code without waiting on a chipset vendor. Those 
AP’s are more expensive, but fixes should presumably be faster.

Two other rubs with 11ax.

  *   The new announced “E” variant with access to the 6 GHz space and the 14 
additional 80 MHz channels. All of those pre-11ax AP’s are probably obsolete, 
and we’ll have 11ax clients that can’t access those channels, making use of 
them challenging despite the obvious benefit.
  *   For pre 11ax AP’s based on Qualcomm chipsets, they’ll never be WiFi 6 
certified because the chipset can’t do OFDMA on the uplink.

Jeff



From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Friday, January 10, 2020 at 9:09 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
> "To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet."

I 100% agree with that sentiment.

At the same time, I can imagine the response an Aruba or Cisco would get for 
waiting to offer those access points. Even offering the AP alongside official 
guidance to disable the feature would leave them in a bad place.

The problem is our network teams are now the ones left holding the potato.

[https://docs.google.com/a/york.edu/uc?id=0B6EvlGH2mMjUVWozX2lScmplOFU]

Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
402.363.5603
jcoeho...@york.edu<mailto:jcoeho...@york.edu>
Please contact helpd...@york.edu<mailto:helpd...@york.edu> for technical 
assistance.

The mission of York College is to transform lives through Christ-centered 
education and to equip students for lifelong service to God, family, and society


On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:16 AM Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:
Hi Norman,

To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet. I know that 
doesn't touch your question, and we all have our own "you do what you gotta do" 
realities.

Thanks for reading through that long post.

-Lee

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<http://its.syr.edu>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<http://syr.edu>


-Original Message-
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 10:10 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

I agree with 100% of that. But here's a question ...

>> I absolutely will not sacrifice an otherwise sound WLAN by tweaking
>> configs or code upgradin for some small minority of poorly designed
>> or suddenly misbehaving clients that can be fixed from the client
>> side

What about Intel's AX driver bugs? I absolutely hate the idea of disabling AX 
to support a few clients. But how many people are telling their helpdesk to 
upgrade drivers on whatever BYOD laptop shows up?
What about a conference with 200 laptops that suddenly finds that half are 
unsupported?

But, once it's disabled, will we ever re-enable AX? It's easy to say that we'll 
disable it "short term", but we know those drivers won't magically update 
themselves. We could be looking at crippling our wireless indefinitely :-/.

Our current AX test environment has it turned off on the 2.4 radio, so that at 
least those users can connect someplace. Leave 5 GHz for those that

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Kristijan Jerkan]

Question: Do those of You who experience this frustration in scale have reason 
to suspect compatibility issues between .ax-Aruba-code/features to be a root 
cause?

We don‘t notice significant .ax client adoption. (being an Aruba shop, but not 
in scale). AFIK even a lage scale event like the 36c3 (>10k peak nerds on ~300 
APs) saw only a dozen of .ax-clients.

From an operationaI standpoint I absolutly feel for You, but I do wonder if You 
had that discussion with the vendor (and if so, how it went). 
We probably all agree with Lee on „prod is not suitable for unadequate inhouse 
tests, dear [whatever] vendor“.


> Am 09.01.2020 um 21:34 schrieb Turner, Ryan H :
> 
> 
> We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 8.0.0.5, 
> but we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the holidays.  
> Power was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some reason, APs 
> associated to the controller in this building did not fail over to the other 
> site.  We are going to be testing this scenario again next week by yanking 
> the power to confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.
>  
> Ryan
>  
>  
> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
> Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
> To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
>  
> What version of 8.5?
>  
> We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and 
> 535s.
>  
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H  wrote:
> All:
>  
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
> points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
> frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
> considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The 
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t 
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the 
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith 
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been 
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another 
> one crops up.
>  
> The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
> deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
> to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are 
> browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, 
> they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing 
> makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a 
> problem resolve.  Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their 
> problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band). 
>   We’ve been working on this problem with them for months.  It always seems 
> as though we have to prove there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We 
> are a sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we 
> bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due 
> to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we don’t want to 
> abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 
> 1,000 515s last year (I think around February).  When they could not get good 
> code to support them on, Aruba bought back half of them.  I asked for them to 
> buy back half because I thought for sure with the 315s that we would have 
> instead, the issues would be fixed by the time the 315s ran out.  Not looking 
> to be the case.
>  
> So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away 
> from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other 
> bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to 
> another vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were 
> your motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, 
> this is a great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 
> choices….  Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for 
> bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes 
> sense), something from Juniper (Mist).
>  
> Thanks,
> Ryan Turner
> Head of Networking
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
> +1 919 445 0113 Office
> +1 919 274 7926 Mobile
> r...@unc.edu
>  
> **
> Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
> list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Coehoorn, Joel]

> "To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet."

I 100% agree with that sentiment.

At the same time, I can imagine the response an Aruba or Cisco would get
for waiting to offer those access points. Even offering the AP alongside
official guidance to disable the feature would leave them in a bad place.

The problem is our network teams are now the ones left holding the potato.

Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
402.363.5603
*jcoeho...@york.edu *

*Please contact helpd...@york.edu  for technical
assistance.*


The mission of York College is to transform lives through
Christ-centered education and to equip students for lifelong service to
God, family, and society


On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:16 AM Lee H Badman <
00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu> wrote:

> Hi Norman,
>
> To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet. I know
> that doesn't touch your question, and we all have our own "you do what you
> gotta do" realities.
>
> Thanks for reading through that long post.
>
> -Lee
>
> Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
> Information Technology Services
> (NDD Group)
> 206 Machinery Hall
> 120 Smith Drive
> Syracuse, New York 13244
> t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu w its.syr.edu
> SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
> syr.edu
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Norman Elton
> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 10:10 AM
> To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
>
> I agree with 100% of that. But here's a question ...
>
> >> I absolutely will not sacrifice an otherwise sound WLAN by tweaking
> >> configs or code upgradin for some small minority of poorly designed
> >> or suddenly misbehaving clients that can be fixed from the client
> >> side
>
> What about Intel's AX driver bugs? I absolutely hate the idea of disabling
> AX to support a few clients. But how many people are telling their helpdesk
> to upgrade drivers on whatever BYOD laptop shows up?
> What about a conference with 200 laptops that suddenly finds that half are
> unsupported?
>
> But, once it's disabled, will we ever re-enable AX? It's easy to say that
> we'll disable it "short term", but we know those drivers won't magically
> update themselves. We could be looking at crippling our wireless
> indefinitely :-/.
>
> Our current AX test environment has it turned off on the 2.4 radio, so
> that at least those users can connect someplace. Leave 5 GHz for those that
> can support AX. I don't like the compromise, but the alternative ("hey
> we're trying out a brand new wireless network that won't work for random
> people") is equally unappetizing.
>
> Sigh.
>
> Norman Elton
> William & Mary
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 9:36 AM Lee H Badman <
> 00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I know a lot of people are likely following along, so I’ll throw one
> more rant nugget out there (and this is not meant to distract from Ryan’s
> original question):
> >
> >
> >
> > Over the many years I’ve been doing this, I have found that MOST
> problems on a healthy, well-designed wireless network are absolutely
> client-related. Even on the likes of Active Directory managed PCs where the
> assumption is that Windows updates make everything fine. These updates
> don’t tend to touch WLAN adapter, BIOS, and chipset drivers which are often
> the root cause of wireless issues.
> >
> >
> >
> > Then there is the fallacy that the latest Intel/Broadcom driver is the
> “best”. Sometimes you have to use an older one on a specific model PC or
> NIC- especially where you are doing 802.1X. The whole effect is greatly
> magnified in the BYOD world that many of us live in with endless mainstream
> and not so mainstream client OS’s. Is it the WLAN vendor’s job to make up
> for all the goofy, ill-designed crap that’s out there? (Talking myself back
> from the ledge here, before I go off on the Wi-Fi Alliance). This situation
> sucks largely, and we’re stuck with it so we have to manage as best as we
> can.
> >
> >
> >
> > Then there are the optional features- for example, I’ve seen band
> > steering make life tough for Windows PCs seemingly out of the blue.
> > Except it wasn’t out of the blue- it was after Windows’ Patch Tuesday.
> > In this case, disabling long-enabled band steering “fixed” the problem
> > of users having wireless connectivity but not getting anywhere and
> > losing ma

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Martin Reynolds]

>
>> > But when infrastructure code deficiencies DO hit, and all of the
>> optional features have been disabled and all of the client devices have
>> been proven to be as healthy as they can be first, it’s the worst of the
>> worst situations for those of us who run big networks because it’s truly
>> out of our hands. While I don’t expect Cisco or Aruba or whoever to make up
>> for client shortcomings or to jump through hoops so some unholy bizarre
>> feature can be implemented (vendors do TOO MUCH of this, in my opinion), I
>> do expect the vendors to absolutely keep their own houses in order and to
>> understand that in big university settings STABILITY IS EVERYTHING.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > If code is bad, tell us. Tell everyone, proactively. Get it the hell
>> off of the website so no one else downloads it. Don’t leave us in “we need
>> to gather data” status- that’s why vendors have million dollar test
>> facilities (and I’ve seen many of them)- gather your own data and just get
>> us back on the rails. If code is considered “bleeding edge”, be honest
>> about that with big red warning labels on the UI and the download links. If
>> HW is defective- same thing. Recall it. Proactively. If HW is “bleeding
>> edge” be brutally honest. Customers should not be part of the QA process or
>> have to play code roulette to find what is “safe”. Any vendor who dares
>> charge for a “bug scrub” before recommending a good code version in this
>> Age of Crappy Code should be ashamed of themselves, BTW.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > And finally. any vendor or VAR who can cavalierly say “well the
>> customer bought bleeding edge stuff, what do they expect” has lost touch
>> with what customer service means. If it’s that fragile, it shouldn’t be on
>> the market, period. Silly Vally needs to slow it down. It ain’t Agile if it
>> sucks.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Sorry for the rant.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
>> >
>> > Information Technology Services
>> > (NDD Group)
>> > 206 Machinery Hall
>> > 120 Smith Drive
>> > Syracuse, New York 13244
>> >
>> > t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu w its.syr.edu
>> >
>> > SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
>> > syr.edu
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
>> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Michael Davis
>> > Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 7:31 AM
>> > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
>> > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
>> why?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > FWIW, some of the most bizarre issues I've ran into with Aruba APs have
>> been related to:
>> >      - MTUs on the path
>> >  - Reassembly of packets
>> >  - Out of order fragments
>> >  - LLDP
>> >  - tx, beacon, basic radio rates
>> >
>> > Some things to look into if the 5GHz radio drop can be
>> deterministically recreated and tested,
>> > but I know that's usually half the battle..
>> >
>> >
>> > On 1/9/20 3:34 PM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
>> >
>> > We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to
>> 8.0.0.5, but we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the
>> holidays.  Power was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some
>> reason, APs associated to the controller in this building did not fail over
>> to the other site.  We are going to be testing this scenario again next
>> week by yanking the power to confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if
>> this was a one-off.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Ryan
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
>> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
>> > Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
>> > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
>> > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
>> why?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > What version of 8.5?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s
>> and 535s.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > All:
>

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Martin Reynolds]

 of this, in my opinion), I
> do expect the vendors to absolutely keep their own houses in order and to
> understand that in big university settings STABILITY IS EVERYTHING.
> >
> >
> >
> > If code is bad, tell us. Tell everyone, proactively. Get it the hell off
> of the website so no one else downloads it. Don’t leave us in “we need to
> gather data” status- that’s why vendors have million dollar test facilities
> (and I’ve seen many of them)- gather your own data and just get us back on
> the rails. If code is considered “bleeding edge”, be honest about that with
> big red warning labels on the UI and the download links. If HW is
> defective- same thing. Recall it. Proactively. If HW is “bleeding edge” be
> brutally honest. Customers should not be part of the QA process or have to
> play code roulette to find what is “safe”. Any vendor who dares charge for
> a “bug scrub” before recommending a good code version in this Age of Crappy
> Code should be ashamed of themselves, BTW.
> >
> >
> >
> > And finally. any vendor or VAR who can cavalierly say “well the customer
> bought bleeding edge stuff, what do they expect” has lost touch with what
> customer service means. If it’s that fragile, it shouldn’t be on the
> market, period. Silly Vally needs to slow it down. It ain’t Agile if it
> sucks.
> >
> >
> >
> > Sorry for the rant.
> >
> >
> >
> > Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
> >
> > Information Technology Services
> > (NDD Group)
> > 206 Machinery Hall
> > 120 Smith Drive
> > Syracuse, New York 13244
> >
> > t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu w its.syr.edu
> >
> > SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
> > syr.edu
> >
> >
> >
> > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Michael Davis
> > Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 7:31 AM
> > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
> why?
> >
> >
> >
> > FWIW, some of the most bizarre issues I've ran into with Aruba APs have
> been related to:
> >  - MTUs on the path
> >  - Reassembly of packets
> >  - Out of order fragments
> >  - LLDP
> >  - tx, beacon, basic radio rates
> >
> > Some things to look into if the 5GHz radio drop can be deterministically
> recreated and tested,
> > but I know that's usually half the battle..
> >
> >
> > On 1/9/20 3:34 PM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
> >
> > We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to
> 8.0.0.5, but we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the
> holidays.  Power was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some
> reason, APs associated to the controller in this building did not fail over
> to the other site.  We are going to be testing this scenario again next
> week by yanking the power to confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if
> this was a one-off.
> >
> >
> >
> > Ryan
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
> > Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
> > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
> why?
> >
> >
> >
> > What version of 8.5?
> >
> >
> >
> > We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s
> and 535s.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
> wrote:
> >
> > All:
> >
> >
> >
> > We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000
> access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and
> downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I
> am considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed,
> another one crops up.
> >
> >
> >
> > The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have
> them deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are
> connected to these APs in the 5G

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Lee H Badman]

Hi Norman,

To me, 11ax APs shouldn't even be on the Enterprise market yet. I know that 
doesn't touch your question, and we all have our own "you do what you gotta do" 
realities. 

Thanks for reading through that long post.

-Lee

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu


-Original Message-
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 10:10 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

I agree with 100% of that. But here's a question ...

>> I absolutely will not sacrifice an otherwise sound WLAN by tweaking 
>> configs or code upgradin for some small minority of poorly designed 
>> or suddenly misbehaving clients that can be fixed from the client 
>> side

What about Intel's AX driver bugs? I absolutely hate the idea of disabling AX 
to support a few clients. But how many people are telling their helpdesk to 
upgrade drivers on whatever BYOD laptop shows up?
What about a conference with 200 laptops that suddenly finds that half are 
unsupported?

But, once it's disabled, will we ever re-enable AX? It's easy to say that we'll 
disable it "short term", but we know those drivers won't magically update 
themselves. We could be looking at crippling our wireless indefinitely :-/.

Our current AX test environment has it turned off on the 2.4 radio, so that at 
least those users can connect someplace. Leave 5 GHz for those that can support 
AX. I don't like the compromise, but the alternative ("hey we're trying out a 
brand new wireless network that won't work for random people") is equally 
unappetizing.

Sigh.

Norman Elton
William & Mary

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 9:36 AM Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu> wrote:
>
> I know a lot of people are likely following along, so I’ll throw one more 
> rant nugget out there (and this is not meant to distract from Ryan’s original 
> question):
>
>
>
> Over the many years I’ve been doing this, I have found that MOST problems on 
> a healthy, well-designed wireless network are absolutely client-related. Even 
> on the likes of Active Directory managed PCs where the assumption is that 
> Windows updates make everything fine. These updates don’t tend to touch WLAN 
> adapter, BIOS, and chipset drivers which are often the root cause of wireless 
> issues.
>
>
>
> Then there is the fallacy that the latest Intel/Broadcom driver is the 
> “best”. Sometimes you have to use an older one on a specific model PC or NIC- 
> especially where you are doing 802.1X. The whole effect is greatly magnified 
> in the BYOD world that many of us live in with endless mainstream and not so 
> mainstream client OS’s. Is it the WLAN vendor’s job to make up for all the 
> goofy, ill-designed crap that’s out there? (Talking myself back from the 
> ledge here, before I go off on the Wi-Fi Alliance). This situation sucks 
> largely, and we’re stuck with it so we have to manage as best as we can.
>
>
>
> Then there are the optional features- for example, I’ve seen band 
> steering make life tough for Windows PCs seemingly out of the blue. 
> Except it wasn’t out of the blue- it was after Windows’ Patch Tuesday. 
> In this case, disabling long-enabled band steering “fixed” the problem 
> of users having wireless connectivity but not getting anywhere and 
> losing massive amounts of pings. BTW… band-steering is not part of the 
> 802.11 standard. Where does “fault” lie in this situation? Microsoft? 
> The WLAN adapter/driver vendor? The WLAN vendor? Me? It’s messy as 
> hell at times, given that “standards” are often a big fat lie when it 
> comes to wireless in my opinion. Disagree? I’ll fight ya J
>
>
>
> So… my premise is that MOST of the time the clients are the issue. And for 
> me, I absolutely will not sacrifice an otherwise sound WLAN by tweaking 
> configs or code upgrading for some small minority of poorly designed or 
> suddenly misbehaving clients that can be fixed from the client side, and I 
> don’t hold any WLAN vendor responsible for fixing the endless list of issues 
> in the client space.
>
>
>
> But when infrastructure code deficiencies DO hit, and all of the optional 
> features have been disabled and all of the client devices have been proven to 
> be as healthy as they can be first, it’s the worst of the worst situations 
> for those of us who run big networks because it’s truly out of our hands. 
> While I don’t expect Cisco or Aruba or whoever to make up for client 
> shortcomings or to jump

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Norman Elton]

s. If HW is defective- same 
> thing. Recall it. Proactively. If HW is “bleeding edge” be brutally honest. 
> Customers should not be part of the QA process or have to play code roulette 
> to find what is “safe”. Any vendor who dares charge for a “bug scrub” before 
> recommending a good code version in this Age of Crappy Code should be ashamed 
> of themselves, BTW.
>
>
>
> And finally. any vendor or VAR who can cavalierly say “well the customer 
> bought bleeding edge stuff, what do they expect” has lost touch with what 
> customer service means. If it’s that fragile, it shouldn’t be on the market, 
> period. Silly Vally needs to slow it down. It ain’t Agile if it sucks.
>
>
>
> Sorry for the rant.
>
>
>
> Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
>
> Information Technology Services
> (NDD Group)
> 206 Machinery Hall
> 120 Smith Drive
> Syracuse, New York 13244
>
> t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu w its.syr.edu
>
> SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
> syr.edu
>
>
>
> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  On Behalf Of Michael Davis
> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 7:31 AM
> To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
>
>
>
> FWIW, some of the most bizarre issues I've ran into with Aruba APs have been 
> related to:
>  - MTUs on the path
>  - Reassembly of packets
>  - Out of order fragments
>  - LLDP
>  - tx, beacon, basic radio rates
>
> Some things to look into if the 5GHz radio drop can be deterministically 
> recreated and tested,
> but I know that's usually half the battle..
>
>
> On 1/9/20 3:34 PM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
>
> We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 8.0.0.5, 
> but we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the holidays.  
> Power was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some reason, APs 
> associated to the controller in this building did not fail over to the other 
> site.  We are going to be testing this scenario again next week by yanking 
> the power to confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.
>
>
>
> Ryan
>
>
>
>
>
> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
> Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
> To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
>
>
>
> What version of 8.5?
>
>
>
> We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and 
> 535s.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H  wrote:
>
> All:
>
>
>
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
> points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
> frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
> considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The 
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t 
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the 
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith 
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been 
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another 
> one crops up.
>
>
>
> The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
> deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
> to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are 
> browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, 
> they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing 
> makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a 
> problem resolve.  Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their 
> problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band). 
>   We’ve been working on this problem with them for months.  It always seems 
> as though we have to prove there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We 
> are a sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we 
> bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due 
> to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we don’t want to 
> abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 
> 1,000 515s last year (I think around February).  When they could not get good 
> code to support them on, Aruba bought back half of them.  I asked for them to 
> buy back half because I thought for sure with the 315s th

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Michael Davis]

FWIW, some of the most bizarre issues I've ran into with Aruba APs have 
been related to:

 - MTUs on the path
 - Reassembly of packets
 - Out of order fragments
 - LLDP
 - tx, beacon, basic radio rates

Some things to look into if the 5GHz radio drop can be deterministically 
recreated and tested,

but I know that's usually half the battle..


On 1/9/20 3:34 PM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:


We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 
8.0.0.5, but we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before 
the holidays.  Power was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  
For some reason, APs associated to the controller in this building did 
not fail over to the other site.  We are going to be testing this 
scenario again next week by yanking the power to confirm if we’ve hit 
yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.


Ryan

*From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 *On Behalf Of *Steve Fletty

*Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
*To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
*Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, 
and why?


What version of 8.5?

We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s 
and 535s.


On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H <mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:


All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around
10,000 access points.  While every relationship with vendors have
their ups and downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally
peaking to the point that I am considering making the enormous
move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest reason is with the
8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider appropriate
to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith
Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he
has been doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have
one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We
have them deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically,
people that are connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop
working.  To the user, they are browsing a site, then it becomes
unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will disconnect
from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a
problem resolve. Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect,
their problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting
in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on this problem with them
for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove there is a
real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the
vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to
issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we don’t want
to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s credit, we
purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around February). 
When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I
thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the
issues would be fixed by the time the 315s ran out. Not looking to
be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to
move away from Aruba (unless they get their act together really
soon).  There are other bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For
those of you that made the switch to another vendor, I would be
curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your motivators,
and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3
choices….  Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped
them for bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop
so this makes sense), something from Juniper (Mist).





**
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Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[James Andrewartha]

Hi all,

I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing up
a rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a nearly
6 month PoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low occurrence
and unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when connected to
our Extreme Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix this bug (and
it definitely was a client bug, their debug traces showed the Surfaces
dropping BAR packets from the AP), so instead I hope they can fix the
new bug we found the Surfaces have with Aruba APs, which is low-impact
but occurs frequently (several times a minute) and so is highly
reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below, but I had also seen the
Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity for 5 minutes or so, HE
was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot this in Airwave, there
will be a period of no traffic transferred for the client. We didn't
have any problem reports in the last few weeks of testing though, while
running on 8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed? The user group (Maths
teachers) were very good in reporting issues, although not always in a
timely fashion. Our new production install is running 8.5.0.5 but I'll
probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 before the teachers get back from
summer holiday.

I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted
that the support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team
should be high on your consideration. The PoC was a tortured process,
definitely not helped by the fact that the partner's engineers were in
another state, and the local Aruba SE had just left, and a new one
wasn't hired until October or so. I've also found Aruba TAC to be not
great in my brief experience with them, certainly not compared to
Extreme GTAC where I have on several occasions dealt directly with a
developer, including one instance where we bisected code one evening to
identify what change caused 2.4GHz to not work on AP3825s. The Aruba SE
from another state did visit and let me know we should have set
ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc on the ESXi host, as we were seeing
connectivity problems that were DHCP related, and that was the fix. It
is documented, but only in the appendix of the install guide
https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/install-guide/virt-appl/appendix/nic-team-vswi.htm
and not in the version that Google returns as the first result. That was
2 months of frustration right there, and partly why for the production
deployment I insisted on physical controllers (although the mobility
master is a VM).

In terms of my (probably ill-informed) view of the competitive
landscape, I've seen an Aerohive demo after Extreme acquired them and
was very impressed, but unfortunately they couldn't get me demo APs in
time to do testing before exams started. I believe WiNG isn't going
away, given the large customers who use it. Their latest APs run the
same wireless code and can be managed by Aerohive^WExtremeCloud IQ, WiNG
or XCA, your choice. Cisco, well WLC is legacy and the 9800 series might
be nice, but I'm yet to hear a good word about DNA Center. It's a beast,
it needs 56 cores, 256GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, and it's not supported
as a VM (although people have made it work
http://blog.vpnv4.com/dna-center-esxi-installation-guide/ ). Meraki, I
don't like their business model. Aruba, well, we chose it in part
because Microsoft use it internally and that prevents them blaming the
wireless when we're getting them to fix their drivers. Mist I've never
used, Ruckus have always had great wireless performance and with
CloudPath are getting their authentication piece in order. Which brings
me to another point, consider the vendor's other offerings like
management systems and RADIUS servers. I've already said my piece about
DNA-C, and Airwave seems to have barely changed since I last used it 8
years ago. Extreme XMC is ok.

I've run out of time today to expound upon the problems with the Surface
wifi chipset, but it seems there is an underlying problem that then
causes different high level problems depending on the AP - I've seen
three different bad behaviours on Extreme, Aruba and Cisco. We've got
200 Surface Pro 7s with Intel AX201 chipsets which I'll hopefully

Thanks,

-- 
James Andrewartha
Network & Projects Engineer
Christ Church Grammar School
Claremont, Western Australia
Ph. (08) 9442 1757
Mob. 0424 160 877

On 10/1/20 12:15 am, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000
> access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups
> and downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the
> point that I am considering making the enormous move to choose a
> different vendor.  The biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and
> bugs that we just don’t consider appropriate to use in production.  It
> has been one thing after the other, and my extremely talented and
> qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) 

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Martin MacLeod-Brown]

I would agree with this, generally Aruba TAC are OK, they do have some bad 1st 
line engineers, but once you get past 1st line they are usually OK. If you can 
get an escalation to the ERT guys, then they tend to be really good.

We have around 450 AP's and currently run 8.5.0.4 and have rolled out around 60 
AP515's with another 40 to go. So far we haven't experienced these issue, but 
we run the 515's with ax functionality disabled. For those people with issues 
do your problems still persist when you disable 'High efficiency Mode'  in the 
wireless system profile?

I saw that the first release of 8.6 code appeared briefly over Xmas but looks 
to have been pulled again - hopefully that will have some performance 
improvements, though if TAC have been unable to find the root cause then it may 
just be hope


Martin 


-Original Message-
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Jeffrey Mesch
Sent: 09 January 2020 20:06
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

I really think this is the key factor in this...how the vendor (and reseller if 
applicable) responds and the relationship overall.

We're a tiny school, just 500 students.

For +5 years we've had a great relationship with arguably one of HP/Aruba's top 
engineers in the state. General Motors headquarters is on his list of 
responsibilities. Despite being so small he'd give us as much time as he gave 
GM.

Despite the relationship, we went with Mist for wireless because of their 
innovation and problems with a couple Aruba resellers.

We hit some snags with Mist, and now both the local reseller and Mist/Juniper 
engineers won't give us the time of day. Level 1 support is good, but beyond 
that we've basically been on our own.

In hindsight I've wondered if our results may have been better had we stuck 
with Aruba because of the well-established relationship. In general we tend to 
have more success with vendors/resellers where there's a solid existing 
relationship.

+++Jeff


On 1/9/20 1:42 PM, Patrick McEvilly wrote:
> I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it's how the vendor 
> responds is what matters.  Our experience on how Aruba handles them 
> has been nothing but positive.
> 
> We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them 
> probably should not have been found by customers.  The 
> support/response from Aruba has always been top notch.  Usually within 
> 24 hours of reporting the bug the issue has been identified and the 
> fix is in the next release.  We do allow our SE remote access into our 
> infrastructure which helps with not draining our own resources while 
> working to resolve these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of 
> reporting the bugs and gets them prioritized for us so for the most 
> part we are hands off when dealing with Aruba support.
> 
> *From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H"
> 
> *Reply-To: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
> 
> *Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
> *To: *"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
> 
> *Subject: *Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
> 
>  From my standpoint, it really isn't about having bugs. They will all 
> have them.  Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.
> 
> Extreme is a very good example of this.  While we have bugs, I know I 
> can escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don't 
> think an issue is getting handled quickly.  If I tell them a bug is 
> critically important, then very soon we are on the call with a 10+ 
> developers/coders/executives working to fix the problem.  While not 
> everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell Extreme something 
> is important, things get resolved.  I feel as though I've had to 
> complain so much in the past two years over issues that I've become 
> chicken little.  It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring 
> an account that when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the 
> wagons need to be circles.  It doesn't seem to be automatic.
> 
> So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.  
> It is the company's response to the problem.
> 
> Ryan
> 
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
> 
> Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago 
> the Aruba folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various 
> unresolvable problems with Aruba AP's, including one that required a 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Blake Brown]

Excellent info. Thanks for sharing Jamie!

~Blake


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Price, Jamie G" 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 2:47 PM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

External Email
Hi Blake and Wi-Fi Pros,

Here’s a sample of our decision matrix. We also included relationship with 
vendors (both the parent company and resellers). Also, what kind of Python 
support and scripting, what can we do out of box or with some programming-- and 
partners already established with the solution that could add on a wanted 
solution (maybe we want to buy a solution APIs/Programming that would do 
automatic classroom attendance).

Happy to chat up our decision criteria with folks, feel free to email me direct 
at jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu<mailto:jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu>.






Social Media Login for Guest (user data
  would require 3rd party project)
Additional licenses
Additional licenses
Base platform
Base platform
Bluetooth Asset light asset tracking
Hard, additional products needed
Hard, additional products needed

Easy
Easy
Ease of IoT Onboarding




Ease of Partner for IoT consumer devices




Student Dorm Hospitality AP




Analytics




Student Success Software and Partnership




Ease of Problem Resolution




Management Server and Reporting




Wayfinding






From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Blake Brown
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:38 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We are also looking at replacing our existing Cisco deployment and have 
narrowed it down to either Mist or Meraki, we are currently doing in house 
trials with both. I would be interested in receiving any additional feedback on 
both of these vendors, on or off this particular email thread, if you’re 
willing to share. More info about the RADIUS bug on the Mist could prove to be 
very beneficial in our decision making.

Thanks,
Blake


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
on behalf of "Price, Jamie G" 
mailto:jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu>>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 10:44 AM
To: 
"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>" 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

External Email
We looked at MIST and Meraki, both great products. We feel our management went 
with ABC so Meraki it is.

In a nutshell (and I can expand upon the “whys”) you get so many more features, 
flexibilities, with an included management platform with either one of these 
vendors. Controllers are expensive bricks. The only real reason to stay with 
controllers is if you do not want a cloud base platform.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:16 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

The wireless-lan mailing list is always interesting, but this is by far the 
best thread yet :)

We are a longtime Aerohive customer, and are aware of Extreme’s plans. Happy to 
talk about my feelings regarding Aerohive off-list. Whomever explained that 
startups are responsive at first, and start to lose their luster as they grow 
... spot on.

We are testing Meraki, Juniper/Mist, and Arista/Mojo. As always, some of the 
shine wears off once you get into the product. I’ve found some surprising 
RADIUS bug on Mist. Their initial support is responsive, but the resolution is 
... forthcoming. We are a big Juniper shop, so are excited about their ability 
to monitor & manage (one day) our EX switches.

If you start and eval, make sure you open tickets and explore how their support 
operation responds to requests (and bugs!).

Norman



On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 12:47 PM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.  We 
have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Chu
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Price, Jamie G]

Hi Blake and Wi-Fi Pros,

Here’s a sample of our decision matrix. We also included relationship with 
vendors (both the parent company and resellers). Also, what kind of Python 
support and scripting, what can we do out of box or with some programming-- and 
partners already established with the solution that could add on a wanted 
solution (maybe we want to buy a solution APIs/Programming that would do 
automatic classroom attendance).

Happy to chat up our decision criteria with folks, feel free to email me direct 
at jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu<mailto:jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu>.






Social Media Login for Guest (user data
  would require 3rd party project)
Additional licenses
Additional licenses
Base platform
Base platform
Bluetooth Asset light asset tracking
Hard, additional products needed
Hard, additional products needed

Easy
Easy
Ease of IoT Onboarding




Ease of Partner for IoT consumer devices




Student Dorm Hospitality AP




Analytics




Student Success Software and Partnership




Ease of Problem Resolution




Management Server and Reporting




Wayfinding






From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Blake Brown
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:38 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We are also looking at replacing our existing Cisco deployment and have 
narrowed it down to either Mist or Meraki, we are currently doing in house 
trials with both. I would be interested in receiving any additional feedback on 
both of these vendors, on or off this particular email thread, if you’re 
willing to share. More info about the RADIUS bug on the Mist could prove to be 
very beneficial in our decision making.

Thanks,
Blake


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
on behalf of "Price, Jamie G" 
mailto:jamie.pr...@cuanschutz.edu>>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 10:44 AM
To: 
"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>" 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

External Email
We looked at MIST and Meraki, both great products. We feel our management went 
with ABC so Meraki it is.

In a nutshell (and I can expand upon the “whys”) you get so many more features, 
flexibilities, with an included management platform with either one of these 
vendors. Controllers are expensive bricks. The only real reason to stay with 
controllers is if you do not want a cloud base platform.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:16 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

The wireless-lan mailing list is always interesting, but this is by far the 
best thread yet :)

We are a longtime Aerohive customer, and are aware of Extreme’s plans. Happy to 
talk about my feelings regarding Aerohive off-list. Whomever explained that 
startups are responsive at first, and start to lose their luster as they grow 
... spot on.

We are testing Meraki, Juniper/Mist, and Arista/Mojo. As always, some of the 
shine wears off once you get into the product. I’ve found some surprising 
RADIUS bug on Mist. Their initial support is responsive, but the resolution is 
... forthcoming. We are a big Juniper shop, so are excited about their ability 
to monitor & manage (one day) our EX switches.

If you start and eval, make sure you open tickets and explore how their support 
operation responds to requests (and bugs!).

Norman



On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 12:47 PM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.  We 
have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Chu
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca<mailto:norman@mcgill.ca>  |   
www.mcgill.ca/it<http://www.mcgill.ca/it&g

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Sullivan, Don]

Ryan,

I used to work for a vendor that built/sold switching, wireless, and telephony 
equipment (not Cisco but a competitor). I was on the post sales side of the 
business working issues through technical support. When we had a situation with 
a customer like you are describing, especially dealing with multiple issues, we 
set up conference calls that included the customer, the account team, and a 
representative from the company’s Technical Support team who owned the trouble 
ticket, plus someone from the group working the bug issues. If necessary we did 
it on multiple days of the week (depending on severity of the issue) so that 
the customer would be able to hear from the guys working the bug(s) as to what 
was going on and how it was being addressed. At a minimum it was once a week 
and every outstanding issue that was being worked was documented and reported 
on. My feeling was that if the customer could hear what was being done to solve 
the issue, it may not alleviate all the frustrations but give them a chance to 
vent to the guys who were knee deep in the code plus add some additional detail 
that could be helpful in solving the issue. I was wondering if Aruba had 
offered you guys anything like. I would think with your university brand and 
influence, they would want to do everything in their power to keep you as a 
customer.

Don Sullivan
Network Administrator
205-726-2111
Technology Services
Samford University

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Turner, Ryan H
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2020 2:35 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: [EXTERNAL]Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and 
why?

We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 8.0.0.5, but 
we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the holidays.  Power 
was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some reason, APs associated 
to the controller in this building did not fail over to the other site.  We are 
going to be testing this scenario again next week by yanking the power to 
confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.

Ryan


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

What version of 8.5?

We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and 535s.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For thos

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

We are on 8.5.0.3 for the ITS cluster. We were going to upgrade to 8.0.0.5, but 
we had a disaster in one of our data centers just before the holidays.  Power 
was tripped for a 13,000 sq foot data center.  For some reason, APs associated 
to the controller in this building did not fail over to the other site.  We are 
going to be testing this scenario again next week by yanking the power to 
confirm if we’ve hit yet another bug, or if this was a one-off.

Ryan


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Steve Fletty
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

What version of 8.5?

We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and 535s.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a 
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices….  
Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), 
something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), 
something from Juniper (Mist).

Thanks,
Ryan Turner
Head of Networking
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 445 0113 Office
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
r...@unc.edu<mailto:r...@unc.edu>


**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community


--
Steve Fletty
Network Engineer
Office of Information Technology (OIT)
University of Minnesota
Phone: 612-625-1048
Email: fle...@umn.edu<mailto:fle...@umn.edu>

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Blake Brown]

Jeff,

Can you elaborate on the "snags" you have hit with Mist? We are considering 
their product but have now heard from several different resources that their 
upper level support may be lacking. We can take this off list if you prefer.


Thanks,
Blake


On 1/9/20, 12:06 PM, "The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv on 
behalf of Jeffrey Mesch"  wrote:

External Email

I really think this is the key factor in this...how the vendor (and 
reseller if applicable) responds and the relationship overall.

We're a tiny school, just 500 students.

For +5 years we've had a great relationship with arguably one of 
HP/Aruba's top engineers in the state. General Motors headquarters is on 
his list of responsibilities. Despite being so small he'd give us as 
much time as he gave GM.

Despite the relationship, we went with Mist for wireless because of 
their innovation and problems with a couple Aruba resellers.

We hit some snags with Mist, and now both the local reseller and 
Mist/Juniper engineers won't give us the time of day. Level 1 support is 
good, but beyond that we've basically been on our own.

In hindsight I've wondered if our results may have been better had we 
stuck with Aruba because of the well-established relationship. In 
general we tend to have more success with vendors/resellers where 
there's a solid existing relationship.

+++Jeff


On 1/9/20 1:42 PM, Patrick McEvilly wrote:
> I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it’s how the vendor 
> responds is what matters.  Our experience on how Aruba handles them has 
> been nothing but positive.
> 
> We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them 
> probably should not have been found by customers.  The support/response 
> from Aruba has always been top notch.  Usually within 24 hours of 
> reporting the bug the issue has been identified and the fix is in the 
> next release.  We do allow our SE remote access into our infrastructure 
> which helps with not draining our own resources while working to resolve 
> these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of reporting the bugs and gets 
> them prioritized for us so for the most part we are hands off when 
> dealing with Aruba support.
> 
> *From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
>  on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H" 
> 
> *Reply-To: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
> 
> *Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
    > *To: *"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
> 
> *Subject: *Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and 
why?
> 
>  From my standpoint, it really isn’t about having bugs. They will all 
> have them.  Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.
> 
> Extreme is a very good example of this.  While we have bugs, I know I 
> can escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don’t 
> think an issue is getting handled quickly.  If I tell them a bug is 
> critically important, then very soon we are on the call with a 10+ 
> developers/coders/executives working to fix the problem.  While not 
> everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell Extreme something is 
> important, things get resolved.  I feel as though I’ve had to complain 
> so much in the past two years over issues that I’ve become chicken 
> little.  It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring an account 
> that when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the wagons need 
> to be circles.  It doesn’t seem to be automatic.
> 
> So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.  
> It is the company’s response to the problem.
> 
> Ryan
> 
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
    >  *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and 
why?
> 
> Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago the 
> Aruba folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various unresolvable 
> problems with Aruba AP’s, including one that required a weekly reboot of 
> a particular model.
> 
> As Lee mentions, the grass isn’t always greener, so expect that you’re 
> going to run into issues with any vendor. As such, it’s going to come 
> down to support/resolution and your relationship with the vendor. 
>   Startups are great as they have a single product wit

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Jeffrey Mesch]

I really think this is the key factor in this...how the vendor (and 
reseller if applicable) responds and the relationship overall.


We're a tiny school, just 500 students.

For +5 years we've had a great relationship with arguably one of 
HP/Aruba's top engineers in the state. General Motors headquarters is on 
his list of responsibilities. Despite being so small he'd give us as 
much time as he gave GM.


Despite the relationship, we went with Mist for wireless because of 
their innovation and problems with a couple Aruba resellers.


We hit some snags with Mist, and now both the local reseller and 
Mist/Juniper engineers won't give us the time of day. Level 1 support is 
good, but beyond that we've basically been on our own.


In hindsight I've wondered if our results may have been better had we 
stuck with Aruba because of the well-established relationship. In 
general we tend to have more success with vendors/resellers where 
there's a solid existing relationship.


+++Jeff


On 1/9/20 1:42 PM, Patrick McEvilly wrote:
I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it’s how the vendor 
responds is what matters.  Our experience on how Aruba handles them has 
been nothing but positive.


We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them 
probably should not have been found by customers.  The support/response 
from Aruba has always been top notch.  Usually within 24 hours of 
reporting the bug the issue has been identified and the fix is in the 
next release.  We do allow our SE remote access into our infrastructure 
which helps with not draining our own resources while working to resolve 
these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of reporting the bugs and gets 
them prioritized for us so for the most part we are hands off when 
dealing with Aruba support.


*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H" 

*Reply-To: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 


*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
*To: *"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 


*Subject: *Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

 From my standpoint, it really isn’t about having bugs. They will all 
have them.  Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.


Extreme is a very good example of this.  While we have bugs, I know I 
can escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don’t 
think an issue is getting handled quickly.  If I tell them a bug is 
critically important, then very soon we are on the call with a 10+ 
developers/coders/executives working to fix the problem.  While not 
everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell Extreme something is 
important, things get resolved.  I feel as though I’ve had to complain 
so much in the past two years over issues that I’ve become chicken 
little.  It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring an account 
that when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the wagons need 
to be circles.  It doesn’t seem to be automatic.


So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.  
It is the company’s response to the problem.


Ryan

*From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 *On Behalf Of *Jeffrey D. Sessler

*Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
*To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
*Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago the 
Aruba folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various unresolvable 
problems with Aruba AP’s, including one that required a weekly reboot of 
a particular model.


As Lee mentions, the grass isn’t always greener, so expect that you’re 
going to run into issues with any vendor. As such, it’s going to come 
down to support/resolution and your relationship with the vendor. 
  Startups are great as they have a single product with a single 
code-train, so they tend to be pretty responsive at the start. Once they 
have a few years under their belt, and their code base starts to 
fragment, you’ll get to the same point you have with the big incumbents 
i.e. too many code bases to support effectively.


Jeff

*From: *The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>

*Date: *Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 8:15 AM
*To: *WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU 
<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> 
<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>

*Subject: *[WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 
access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and 
downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point 
that I am considering making the enormous move to choose a different 
vendor.  The biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we 
just don

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Hales, David]

We've been an Aerohive shop for at least 10 years and have had a pretty good 
experience overall.  For scale we have about 2,000 WAPS across campus and we 
use an on-premise HiveManager box for the management plane functionality.  We 
had a similar issue several years back when they introduced the AP370/390 Wave 
1 AC gear.  It seemed to be chipset/driver based problems.  We weren't happy 
with the problem, but were pleased with the way the company handled it.  We got 
C-suite escalation pretty early on and they quickly made arrangements to take 
back every one of those units and replace them with a different product line.

Coincidentally, we are also an Extreme shop for wired gear.  We were waiting to 
see how the merger shook out before making a strategic decision going forward, 
but it looks like we'll be sticking with both product lines going forward.

David Hales
Network Systems Administrator
Information Technology Services
1010 N. Peachtree
Clement Hall 117
Cookeville, TN 38505
P 931-372-3983
F 931-372-6130
E dha...@tntech.edu<mailto:dha...@tntech.edu>
www.tntech.edu/its<http://www.tntech.edu/its>
[Tennessee Tech Logo]<https://www.tntech.edu/>

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Stephen Belcher
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 10:49 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?


External Email Warning

This email originated from outside the university. Please use caution when 
opening attachments, clicking links, or responding to requests.


Cisco shop here with around 5300 APs. We are looking to get away from Cisco 
because of bugs and poor support. I would be happy to go in more detail 
off-line.

Our fist choice is Mist. They are doing some amazing things but the price is a 
premium and we may not be able to afford them.

Our second choice was Extreme (we have one small site with Extreme wireless) 
but, we just found out yesterday that with the acquisition of AeroHive, all new 
wireless will be based on their AeroHive HiveManager cloud platform rebranded 
to ExtremeCloud IQ. We are doing a deeper technical dive for that platform to 
understand the new offering. That being said, does anyone use AeroHive in a 
large deployment?

Maybe it's just a problem with Wi-Fi in general...

Steve

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Michael Davis
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:27 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

While not an answer to your request, we are also starting to look into this 
possibility for
the same reasons.  While we only have about 500 515s deployed with WiFi6 
extensions
disabled, we haven't seen tickets to this extent but we also don't have any 
greenfield
515-only deployments.

We will be looking at Mist, being a heavy Juniper shop, but also Cisco as some 
existing
collaborations may lead to cost effective transitions..


On 1/9/20 11:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
All:

We've been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don't consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We've been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I'm fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I'm extra frustrated that due to issues we've seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don't want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba's credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Amel Caldwell]

I have direct experience with what Ryan described.  A couple days after X-mas 
when there were very few people in our building, I lost connectivity on my 
iPhone, 2 Mac Book Pro (different vintages), and a wireless Avaya desk phone.  
At the same time an engineer across the hall lost connectivity on a Windows 
laptop and his android phone, plus and Aruba Cape Sensor experienced the same 
thing.  On the clients involved there was no indication of there being a 
problem and they appeared to be connected, just no IP connectivity.  I did see 
that the Cape sensor roamed from the AP where it had -62 signal to one that had 
-89 and that is when we lost connectivity and 3 minutes later everyone roamed 
back and we again had connectivity.

So as Ryan described, no common drivers, we still see the SSID, we just get no 
traffic and it clears with no intervention.

Amel Caldwell


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H" 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 8:51 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

This isn’t the problem.  The drivers are updated.  Clients see the ssid.  Just 
periodically they stop communicating.
Ryan Turner
Head of Networking, ITS
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
+1 919 445 0113 Office


On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:48 AM, Martin Reynolds  wrote:
Not sure if this could be of help but the issues with the 515 and 535 Aruba APs 
we use was driver related to the 802.11ax code that is on the AP's.  This is 
not an Aruba specific issue but affects other vendors as well.  The following 
link is for the updated Intel drivers.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/54799/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking.html

In our case users could not see the ESSIDs at all where 515 APs were installed 
but could where other model of AP's (2xx and 3xx)were installed.  By using a 
different adapter from what is installed in the hardware (example USB-and not 
Intel) that allowed us to see the ESSIDs

Thanks,
Martin

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 11:40 AM David Morton 
mailto:dmor...@uw.edu>> wrote:
Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu<http://uw.edu>
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users d

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Blake Brown]

We are also looking at replacing our existing Cisco deployment and have 
narrowed it down to either Mist or Meraki, we are currently doing in house 
trials with both. I would be interested in receiving any additional feedback on 
both of these vendors, on or off this particular email thread, if you’re 
willing to share. More info about the RADIUS bug on the Mist could prove to be 
very beneficial in our decision making.

Thanks,
Blake


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Price, Jamie G" 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 10:44 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

External Email
We looked at MIST and Meraki, both great products. We feel our management went 
with ABC so Meraki it is.

In a nutshell (and I can expand upon the “whys”) you get so many more features, 
flexibilities, with an included management platform with either one of these 
vendors. Controllers are expensive bricks. The only real reason to stay with 
controllers is if you do not want a cloud base platform.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:16 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

The wireless-lan mailing list is always interesting, but this is by far the 
best thread yet :)

We are a longtime Aerohive customer, and are aware of Extreme’s plans. Happy to 
talk about my feelings regarding Aerohive off-list. Whomever explained that 
startups are responsive at first, and start to lose their luster as they grow 
... spot on.

We are testing Meraki, Juniper/Mist, and Arista/Mojo. As always, some of the 
shine wears off once you get into the product. I’ve found some surprising 
RADIUS bug on Mist. Their initial support is responsive, but the resolution is 
... forthcoming. We are a big Juniper shop, so are excited about their ability 
to monitor & manage (one day) our EX switches.

If you start and eval, make sure you open tickets and explore how their support 
operation responds to requests (and bugs!).

Norman



On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 12:47 PM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.  We 
have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Chu
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca<mailto:norman@mcgill.ca>  |   
www.mcgill.ca/it<http://www.mcgill.ca/it>
805 rue Sherbrooke 
Ouest<https://www.google.com/maps/search/805+rue+Sherbrooke+Ouest?entry=gmail=g>,
 Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
[cid:image001.png@01D5C6E1.458457A0]

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Michael Hulko
Sent: January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith 
Drive<https://www.google

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Lee H Badman]

Controllers, NMS, etc- nice to make them all someone else’s problem.

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Price, Jamie G
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:44 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We looked at MIST and Meraki, both great products. We feel our management went 
with ABC so Meraki it is.

In a nutshell (and I can expand upon the “whys”) you get so many more features, 
flexibilities, with an included management platform with either one of these 
vendors. Controllers are expensive bricks. The only real reason to stay with 
controllers is if you do not want a cloud base platform.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Elton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:16 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

The wireless-lan mailing list is always interesting, but this is by far the 
best thread yet :)

We are a longtime Aerohive customer, and are aware of Extreme’s plans. Happy to 
talk about my feelings regarding Aerohive off-list. Whomever explained that 
startups are responsive at first, and start to lose their luster as they grow 
... spot on.

We are testing Meraki, Juniper/Mist, and Arista/Mojo. As always, some of the 
shine wears off once you get into the product. I’ve found some surprising 
RADIUS bug on Mist. Their initial support is responsive, but the resolution is 
... forthcoming. We are a big Juniper shop, so are excited about their ability 
to monitor & manage (one day) our EX switches.

If you start and eval, make sure you open tickets and explore how their support 
operation responds to requests (and bugs!).

Norman



On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 12:47 PM Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:
At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.  We 
have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Norman Chu
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca<mailto:norman@mcgill.ca>  |   
www.mcgill.ca/it<http://www.mcgill.ca/it>
805 rue Sherbrooke 
Ouest<https://www.google.com/maps/search/805+rue+Sherbrooke+Ouest?entry=gmail=g>,
 Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
[1501096696117_IITSlogo4email-cleaner-350.png]

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of Michael Hulko
Sent: January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith 
Drive<https://www.google.com/maps/search/120+Smith+Drive+%0D%0ASyracuse,+New+York+13244?entry=gmail=g>
Syracuse, New York 
13244<https:/

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Patrick McEvilly]

I agree with you, all vendors will have bugs and it’s how the vendor responds 
is what matters.  Our experience on how Aruba handles them has been nothing but 
positive.

We have found our fair share of bugs on Aruba and yes some of them probably 
should not have been found by customers.  The support/response from Aruba has 
always been top notch.  Usually within 24 hours of reporting the bug the issue 
has been identified and the fix is in the next release.  We do allow our SE 
remote access into our infrastructure which helps with not draining our own 
resources while working to resolve these problems. Our Aruba SE takes care of 
reporting the bugs and gets them prioritized for us so for the most part we are 
hands off when dealing with Aruba support.



From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of "Turner, Ryan H" 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:01 PM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

>From my standpoint, it really isn’t about having bugs. They will all have 
>them.  Its how the vendor handles the request when it comes in.

Extreme is a very good example of this.  While we have bugs, I know I can 
escalate it all the way to the C level of executives if I don’t think an issue 
is getting handled quickly.  If I tell them a bug is critically important, then 
very soon we are on the call with a 10+ developers/coders/executives working to 
fix the problem.  While not everything has been perfect, I know that if I tell 
Extreme something is important, things get resolved.  I feel as though I’ve had 
to complain so much in the past two years over issues that I’ve become chicken 
little.  It should be obvious to an executive team monitoring an account that 
when you have significant bugs exceed 2-3 months, the wagons need to be 
circles.  It doesn’t seem to be automatic.

So, in short, its not always the existence of bugs that is the problem.  It is 
the company’s response to the problem.

Ryan

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Jeffrey D. Sessler
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:56 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Our consortium had both Cisco and Aruba, and about 12-18 months ago the Aruba 
folks tossed in the towel and went Cisco. Various unresolvable problems with 
Aruba AP’s, including one that required a weekly reboot of a particular model.

As Lee mentions, the grass isn’t always greener, so expect that you’re going to 
run into issues with any vendor. As such, it’s going to come down to 
support/resolution and your relationship with the vendor.  Startups are great 
as they have a single product with a single code-train, so they tend to be 
pretty responsive at the start. Once they have a few years under their belt, 
and their code base starts to fragment, you’ll get to the same point you have 
with the big incumbents i.e. too many code bases to support effectively.

Jeff


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 8:15 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?
All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticat

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Steve Fletty]

What version of 8.5?

We saw some issues in our lab prior to 8.5.0.4. We have a mix of 335s and
535s.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
wrote:

> All:
>
>
>
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000
> access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and
> downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I
> am considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed,
> another one crops up.
>
>
>
> The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them
> deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are
> connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they
> are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their
> phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.
> Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and
> seeing a problem resolve.  Normally, if the users disconnect then
> reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting
> in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on this problem with them for
> months.  It always seems as though we have to prove there is a real issue.
> I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9
> times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m
> extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train
> that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s
> credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around
> February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba
> bought back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I
> thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would
> be fixed by the time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.
>
>
>
> So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away
> from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are
> other bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the
> switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted,
> what were your motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of
> course, this is a great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we
> have 3 choices….  Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped
> them for bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this
> makes sense), something from Juniper (Mist).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan Turner
>
> Head of Networking
>
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>
> +1 919 445 0113 Office
>
> +1 919 274 7926 Mobile
>
> r...@unc.edu
>
>
>
> **
> Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire
> community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the
> message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply.
> Additional participation and subscription information can be found at
> https://www.educause.edu/community
>


-- 
Steve Fletty
Network Engineer
Office of Information Technology (OIT)
University of Minnesota
Phone: 612-625-1048
Email: fle...@umn.edu

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Norman Elton]

The wireless-lan mailing list is always interesting, but this is by far the
best thread yet :)

We are a longtime Aerohive customer, and are aware of Extreme’s plans.
Happy to talk about my feelings regarding Aerohive off-list. Whomever
explained that startups are responsive at first, and start to lose their
luster as they grow ... spot on.

We are testing Meraki, Juniper/Mist, and Arista/Mojo. As always, some of
the shine wears off once you get into the product. I’ve found some
surprising RADIUS bug on Mist. Their initial support is responsive, but the
resolution is ... forthcoming. We are a big Juniper shop, so are excited
about their ability to monitor & manage (one day) our EX switches.

If you start and eval, make sure you open tickets and explore how their
support operation responds to requests (and bugs!).

Norman



On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 12:47 PM Turner, Ryan H 
wrote:

> At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.
> We have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.
>
>
>
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> *On Behalf Of *Norman Chu
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
> why?
>
>
>
> We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility
> master) with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months
> and things have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a
> few issues.
>
>
>
> *Norman Chu*
>
> Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
>
> IT Services
>
> T:  514-398-7299
>
> norman@mcgill.ca  |   www.mcgill.ca/it
>
> 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/805+rue+Sherbrooke+Ouest?entry=gmail=g>,
> Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
>
> [image: 1501096696117_IITSlogo4email-cleaner-350.png]
>
>
>
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> *On Behalf Of *Michael Hulko
> *Sent:* January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
> why?
>
>
>
> May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX
> chipsets that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had
> to be turned off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.
>
>
>
> ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6
> (as per our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.
> Any issues with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to
> 8.3x as it also seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.
>
>
>
> M
>
>
>
> On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman <
> 00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at
> client device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on
> which client NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any
> favors of late. Is very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed
> laptops may all have same bum driver.
>
>
>
> Just asking…
>
>
>
> *Lee Badman* | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
>
> Information Technology Services
> (NDD Group)
> 206 Machinery Hall
> 120 Smith Drive
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/120+Smith+Drive+%0D%0ASyracuse,+New+York+13244?entry=gmail=g>
> Syracuse, New York 13244
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/120+Smith+Drive+%0D%0ASyracuse,+New+York+13244?entry=gmail=g>
>
> *t* 315.443.3003  * e* lhbad...@syr.edu *w* its.syr.edu
>
> *SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY*
> syr.edu
>
>
>
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv <
> WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> *On Behalf Of *David Morton
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
> *To:* WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and
> why?
>
>
>
> Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since
> installing 515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first
> step to any migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no
> connectivity. In most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I
> believe that I remain connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that
> 30 seconds to a couple of minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now
> deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of our residence halls so I am concerned
> about their experience as well. Just before the holiday

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

At this time, this doesn’t appear to bother anything other than the 515s.  We 
have 315s on the same code and have not gotten reports.

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Norman Chu
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:08 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca  |   www.mcgill.ca/it<http://www.mcgill.ca/it>
805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
[1501096696117_IITSlogo4email-cleaner-350.png]

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Michael Hulko
Sent: January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<http://its.syr.edu>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<http://syr.edu>

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu/>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Christopher H Ressel]

We had issues in early 8.5.x  that caused significant problems across our 
environment in a cluster due to an STM memory leak. This only presented itself 
in 3 controller clusters that exceeded certain concurrent client counts. 
Symptomatically, this caused clients to be intermittently disconnected, 
significant lag (in some instances minutes) in connecting, and the inability of 
some clients to connect at all. It was a pretty long week spent finding the bug 
due to the intermittency of the issue.



[University of Nevada, Reno]<http://www.unr.edu/>

Chris Ressel
Senior Network Engineer
Office of Information Technology
1664 N. Virginia St.
Mailstop 430

work-phone: 7756826034
email: cres...@unr.edu<mailto:cres...@unr.edu>
website: https://oit.unr.edu<https://oit.unr.edu/>


From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Norman Chu 

Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 9:17 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca  |   
www.mcgill.ca/it<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mcgill.ca%2Fit=01%7C01%7Ccressel%40UNR.EDU%7C11b389e1939e4457c4b408d79527d293%7C523b4bfc0ebd4c03b2b96f6a17fd31d8%7C1=F8paxMpLN5o6yvfPCzKaRxqmpZAYqT14QhwHqoTgWTA%3D=0>
805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
[1501096696117_IITSlogo4email-cleaner-350.png]

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Michael Hulko
Sent: January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M



On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fits.syr.edu=01%7C01%7Ccressel%40UNR.EDU%7C11b389e1939e4457c4b408d79527d293%7C523b4bfc0ebd4c03b2b96f6a17fd31d8%7C1=wBM7l%2F5z79eWvwu9tCAlXyDIz6ri5b6ZNst%2BgW8vT2A%3D=0>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsyr.edu=01%7C01%7Ccressel%40UNR.EDU%7C11b389e1939e4457c4b408d79527d293%7C523b4bfc0ebd4c03b2b96f6a17fd31d8%7C1=Mci%2BTeHX4RFh1E52WoEtTEizyCfwYNnI%2B5zjR5VRhec%3D=0>

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing a

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Norman Chu]

We have been running v8.5.0.4 (clustered controllers off of a mobility master) 
with a little over 4100 AP305’s and AP325’s for a couple of months and things 
have been stable here.  Prior to this, v8.3.0.8 was causing us a few issues.

Norman Chu
Systems Administrator, Network Infrastructure Team
IT Services
T:  514-398-7299
norman@mcgill.ca  |   www.mcgill.ca/it<http://www.mcgill.ca/it>
805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Burnside Hall, Montréal, QC. H3A-0B9  Canada
[1501096696117_IITSlogo4email-cleaner-350.png]

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Michael Hulko
Sent: January 9, 2020 11:58 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M


On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<http://its.syr.edu>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<http://syr.edu>

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu/>



On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  No

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Nick Rauer]

We installed 100+ AP-515s in every other room in our brand new Dorm that we 
opened back in September 2019. Because of the use of 515’s in this building, it 
forced our hand to move to 8.x sooner than expected. The entire months of 
September, October, and November we had very similar issues. We sent out a mass 
email to the students with information on the Intel driver bug and still had 
issues even after that mess.

 

After working with TAC for days, we finally decided to upgrade to 8.5.0.4 per 
Aruba recommendation. Since the upgrade, our students were able to make it 
through finals with minimal issues. I am attempting to stay optimistic that 
things will remain smooth when they return from break, but I am preparing for 
the worst.

 

Let's hope they figure things out in the new year!

 

Nick Rauer

Manager of Networking and Telecommunications 

Wheaton College – Massachusetts

W  <https://wheatoncollege.edu/> https://wheatoncollege.edu/



 

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
[mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

 

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.  

 

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look. 

 

David

 

 

David Morton 
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

 

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu <http://uw.edu> 





On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu> > wrote:

 

All:

 

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

 

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

 

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their ac

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Miller, Keith C]

Hi Lee,

We were recommended by Aruba to move to ArubaOS 8.5 for the 500 series since 
they were planning on sunsetting 8.4 at the end of 2019. We are a couple of 
minor revisions off of the latest 8.5 code, but we don’t really have any 
options with regards to the 500 series APs. 8.4 was the first supported release 
and is no longer recommended and 8.6 is currently in beta.

Regards,
Keith
O: (919)962-6564 M: (803)464-2397

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 11:50 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Interesting. I wonder- does Aruba consider any of these APs or code versions 
that you all are struggling with to be “bleeding edge” or is it all mainstream, 
supposedly stable product at this point?

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Martin Reynolds
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:48 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Not sure if this could be of help but the issues with the 515 and 535 Aruba APs 
we use was driver related to the 802.11ax code that is on the AP's.  This is 
not an Aruba specific issue but affects other vendors as well.  The following 
link is for the updated Intel drivers.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/54799/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking.html

In our case users could not see the ESSIDs at all where 515 APs were installed 
but could where other model of AP's (2xx and 3xx)were installed.  By using a 
different adapter from what is installed in the hardware (example USB-and not 
Intel) that allowed us to see the ESSIDs

Thanks,
Martin

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 11:40 AM David Morton 
mailto:dmor...@uw.edu>> wrote:
Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu<http://uw.edu>
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>



On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disco

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Lee H Badman]

Good information. And good discussion.

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Miller, Keith C
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:07 PM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Hi Lee,

While we’ve experienced the issue with Intel NICs not being able to see SSIDs 
advertised when .11ax is enabled, a driver update has typically resolved that 
problem. The problems we are seeing range across many different device 
platforms ranging from Apple devices (iPhones and MacBook Pros) to Lenovo 
laptops and Samsung phones. I definitely do not believe it’s client related at 
this point.

Regards,
Keith
O: (919)962-6564 M: (803)464-2397

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
on behalf of Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 11:45 AM
To: 
"WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>" 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band wi

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Miller, Keith C]

Hi Lee,

While we’ve experienced the issue with Intel NICs not being able to see SSIDs 
advertised when .11ax is enabled, a driver update has typically resolved that 
problem. The problems we are seeing range across many different device 
platforms ranging from Apple devices (iPhones and MacBook Pros) to Lenovo 
laptops and Samsung phones. I definitely do not believe it’s client related at 
this point.

Regards,
Keith
O: (919)962-6564 M: (803)464-2397

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 on behalf of Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 11:45 AM
To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" 
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>



On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When t

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Max McGrath]

Ryan -

I can't speak to anything related to Aruba (except that we could never
afford ClearPass).

We've been running the WiNG platform (initially from Motorola then acquired
by Zebra now owned by Extreme) since 2011 and we've never been affected by
a bug in the platform (small or large).  With that said, the main WiNG user
interface is a bit lackluster and their feature set is likely less than
Aruba.  The combination of WiNG and PacketFence has served us well for the
last 8 years.

I will also say it doesn't seem to be a very popular platform based on the
strange looks I've received at conferences (people seem to be always amazed
if you aren't running Cisco or Aruba in higher ed).

Max
--
Max McGrath  
Infrastructure and Security Manager
Carthage College
262-551-
mmcgr...@carthage.edu


On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:15 AM Turner, Ryan H 
wrote:

> All:
>
>
>
> We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000
> access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and
> downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I
> am considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The
> biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t
> consider appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the
> other, and my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith
> Miller) might as well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been
> doing for them to solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed,
> another one crops up.
>
>
>
> The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them
> deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are
> connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they
> are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their
> phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.
> Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and
> seeing a problem resolve.  Normally, if the users disconnect then
> reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I think they end up connecting
> in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on this problem with them for
> months.  It always seems as though we have to prove there is a real issue.
> I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9
> times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m
> extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train
> that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s
> credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around
> February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba
> bought back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I
> thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would
> be fixed by the time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.
>
>
>
> So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away
> from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are
> other bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the
> switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted,
> what were your motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of
> course, this is a great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we
> have 3 choices….  Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped
> them for bugs), something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this
> makes sense), something from Juniper (Mist).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan Turner
>
> Head of Networking
>
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>
> +1 919 445 0113 Office
>
> +1 919 274 7926 Mobile
>
> r...@unc.edu
>
>
>
> **
> Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire
> community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the
> message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply.
> Additional participation and subscription information can be found at
> https://www.educause.edu/community
> 
>

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Michael Hulko]

May not be completely related, but we have had issues with newer AX chipsets 
that utilize NDIS 6.3 code set.  Some of the advanced features had to be turned 
off as a work around such as packet coalescing etc.

ALthough we have no 515’s in our environment, we are progressing to 8.6 (as per 
our SE) in the coming weeks and this does not make me comfortable.  Any issues 
with the 300 series APs and 8.5x? May rethink and downgrade to 8.3x as it also 
seems to only support the AP103Hs as well.

M

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:44 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu<mailto:00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu>>
 wrote:

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w 
its.syr.edu<http://its.syr.edu>
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu<http://syr.edu>

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> 
On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: 
WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu/>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

This isn’t the problem.  The drivers are updated.  Clients see the ssid.  Just 
periodically they stop communicating.

Ryan Turner
Head of Networking, ITS
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
+1 919 445 0113 Office

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:48 AM, Martin Reynolds  wrote:


Not sure if this could be of help but the issues with the 515 and 535 Aruba APs 
we use was driver related to the 802.11ax code that is on the AP's.  This is 
not an Aruba specific issue but affects other vendors as well.  The following 
link is for the updated Intel drivers.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/54799/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking.html

In our case users could not see the ESSIDs at all where 515 APs were installed 
but could where other model of AP's (2xx and 3xx)were installed.  By using a 
different adapter from what is installed in the hardware (example USB-and not 
Intel) that allowed us to see the ESSIDs

Thanks,
Martin

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 11:40 AM David Morton 
mailto:dmor...@uw.edu>> wrote:
Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu

On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the 

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Lee H Badman]

Interesting. I wonder- does Aruba consider any of these APs or code versions 
that you all are struggling with to be “bleeding edge” or is it all mainstream, 
supposedly stable product at this point?

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Martin Reynolds
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:48 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Not sure if this could be of help but the issues with the 515 and 535 Aruba APs 
we use was driver related to the 802.11ax code that is on the AP's.  This is 
not an Aruba specific issue but affects other vendors as well.  The following 
link is for the updated Intel drivers.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/54799/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking.html

In our case users could not see the ESSIDs at all where 515 APs were installed 
but could where other model of AP's (2xx and 3xx)were installed.  By using a 
different adapter from what is installed in the hardware (example USB-and not 
Intel) that allowed us to see the ESSIDs

Thanks,
Martin

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 11:40 AM David Morton 
mailto:dmor...@uw.edu>> wrote:
Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu<http://uw.edu>
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Turner, Ryan H]

These aren’t device driver issues.  We have those two and it’s different.

Ryan Turner
Head of Networking, ITS
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
+1 919 445 0113 Office

On Jan 9, 2020, at 11:45 AM, Lee H Badman 
<00db5b77bd95-dmarc-requ...@listserv.educause.edu> wrote:


No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor,

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Stephen Belcher]

Cisco shop here with around 5300 APs. We are looking to get away from Cisco 
because of bugs and poor support. I would be happy to go in more detail 
off-line.

Our fist choice is Mist. They are doing some amazing things but the price is a 
premium and we may not be able to afford them.

Our second choice was Extreme (we have one small site with Extreme wireless) 
but, we just found out yesterday that with the acquisition of AeroHive, all new 
wireless will be based on their AeroHive HiveManager cloud platform rebranded 
to ExtremeCloud IQ. We are doing a deeper technical dive for that platform to 
understand the new offering. That being said, does anyone use AeroHive in a 
large deployment?

Maybe it's just a problem with Wi-Fi in general...

Steve

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of Michael Davis
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:27 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

While not an answer to your request, we are also starting to look into this 
possibility for
the same reasons.  While we only have about 500 515s deployed with WiFi6 
extensions
disabled, we haven't seen tickets to this extent but we also don't have any 
greenfield
515-only deployments.

We will be looking at Mist, being a heavy Juniper shop, but also Cisco as some 
existing
collaborations may lead to cost effective transitions..


On 1/9/20 11:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:
All:

We've been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don't consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We've been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I'm fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I'm extra frustrated that due to issues we've seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don't want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba's credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I'm not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a 
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices  
Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), 
something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), 
something from Juniper (Mist).

Thanks,
Ryan Turner
Head of Networking
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 445 0113 Office
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
r...@unc.edu<mailto:r...@unc.edu>


**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community




--

 Mike Davis

 IT - University of Delaware  - 302.831.8756

 Newark, DE  19716 Email da...@udel.edu<mailto:da...@udel.edu>

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the per

RE: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Lee H Badman]

No insult meant to anyone’s intelligence, but are you also looking at client 
device drivers etc in the context of these issues? Depending on which client 
NIC is in play, the device makers haven’t been doing us any favors of late. Is 
very possible for example that hundreds of AD-managed laptops may all have same 
bum driver.

Just asking…

Lee Badman | Network Architect (CWNE#200)
Information Technology Services
(NDD Group)
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   e lhbad...@syr.edu<mailto:lhbad...@syr.edu> w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Community Group Listserv 
 On Behalf Of David Morton
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:39 AM
To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu<http://uw.edu>


On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a 
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices….  
Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), 
something from Extreme (we are 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[David Morton]

Ryan, we have been experiencing some of the very same issues. Since installing 
515s and resulting 8.5.x code in our offices (always our first step to any 
migration) we too have experienced unexplained periods of no connectivity. In 
most or all the cases I’ve personally experienced, I believe that I remain 
connected at an 802.11 standpoint but will have that 30 seconds to a couple of 
minutes of no IP connectivity. We have now deployed 515s and 8.5.x in one of 
our residence halls so I am concerned about their experience as well. Just 
before the holiday break we had a series of very high-profile outages that 
impacted our students leading up to and during finals week. The issue got so 
bad that our CIO had to issue a letter to students explaining the problem and 
what we are doing about it. This is the first time that this level of 
communication was needed in my 15 years at the UW using Aruba.

We too are a heavy Juniper shop and have recently received a MIST demo kit. We 
haven’t done anything with it yet due to lack of resources, but if things 
continue on the current path we may give it a more serious look.

David


David Morton
Director, Network & Telecom Design/Architecture
University of Washington
dmorton @uw.edu
tel 206.221.7814

PS I am currently on medical leave so if you wish to reply off-list, please 
direct it to Amel Caldwell, amelc@ uw.edu

On Jan 9, 2020, at 8:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H 
mailto:rhtur...@email.unc.edu>> wrote:

All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 access 
points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups and downs, my 
frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the point that I am 
considering making the enormous move to choose a different vendor.  The biggest 
reason is with the 8.X code train, and bugs that we just don’t consider 
appropriate to use in production.  It has been one thing after the other, and 
my extremely talented and qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as 
well be on the Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to 
solve bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.

The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have them 
deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that are connected 
to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the user, they are browsing 
a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they are on their phone, they will 
disconnect from wifi and everything works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 
802.11 network look worse than switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve.  
Normally, if the users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead 
(but I think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on 
this problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to prove 
there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a sophisticated shop.  If 
we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we bring it to the vendor, it is a 
real problem.  I’m extra frustrated that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on 
the 8.3X train that we don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To 
Aruba’s credit, we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around 
February).  When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I thought for 
sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues would be fixed by the 
time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.

So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move away from 
Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  There are other bugs 
I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you that made the switch to another 
vendor, I would be curious how long the honeymoon lasted, what were your 
motivators, and were you happy with the overall results?  Of course, this is a 
great opportunity to plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices….  
Something from Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), 
something from Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), 
something from Juniper (Mist).

Thanks,
Ryan Turner
Head of Networking
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
+1 919 445 0113 Office
+1 919 274 7926 Mobile
r...@unc.edu


**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community


**
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and subscription information can be found at 

Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Who has transitioned away from Aruba, and why?

[Michael Davis]

While not an answer to your request, we are also starting to look into 
this possibility for
the same reasons.  While we only have about 500 515s deployed with WiFi6 
extensions
disabled, we haven't seen tickets to this extent but we also don't have 
any greenfield

515-only deployments.

We will be looking at Mist, being a heavy Juniper shop, but also Cisco 
as some existing

collaborations may lead to cost effective transitions..


On 1/9/20 11:15 AM, Turner, Ryan H wrote:


All:

We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 
access points.  While every relationship with vendors have their ups 
and downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the 
point that I am considering making the enormous move to choose a 
different vendor.  The biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and 
bugs that we just don’t consider appropriate to use in production.  It 
has been one thing after the other, and my extremely talented and 
qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as well be on the 
Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to solve 
bugs.  Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up.


The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train.  We have 
them deployed in one of our IT buildings.  Periodically, people that 
are connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working.  To the 
user, they are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive.  If they 
are on their phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything 
works fine on cell.  Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than 
switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve. Normally, if the users 
disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I think 
they end up connecting in the 2.4G band).   We’ve been working on this 
problem with them for months.  It always seems as though we have to 
prove there is a real issue.  I’m fed up with it.  We are a 
sophisticated shop.  If we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we 
bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem.  I’m extra frustrated 
that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we 
don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus.  To Aruba’s credit, 
we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around February).  
When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought 
back half of them.  I asked for them to buy back half because I 
thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues 
would be fixed by the time the 315s ran out.  Not looking to be the case.


So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move 
away from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon).  
There are other bugs I’m not even mentioning here.  For those of you 
that made the switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long 
the honeymoon lasted, what were your motivators, and were you happy 
with the overall results?  Of course, this is a great opportunity to 
plug your vendor.  As I see it, we have 3 choices….  Something from 
Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), something from 
Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), something 
from Juniper (Mist).


Thanks,

Ryan Turner

Head of Networking

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

+1 919 445 0113 Office

+1 919 274 7926 Mobile

r...@unc.edu 

**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire 
community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the 
message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email 
reply. Additional participation and subscription information can be 
found at https://www.educause.edu/community





--
 Mike Davis
 IT - University of Delaware  - 302.831.8756
 Newark, DE  19716 Email da...@udel.edu


**
Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community 
list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and 
paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation 
and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community