I’ve just moved from somewhere that was using Aerohive (~150 AP230s) and we were happy with it. Roaming and throughput were very solid, troubleshooting is excellent. We were doing 802.1x auth breaking out the VLANs locally on the switches but you can spin up a local VM if you have networks that you want to tunnel back to a central location for guest access or the like (we were considering plans for this as I was leaving). We didn’t make much use of the PPSK but it is a really nice feature that I note that Aruba now seems to be adding too. The APs will fully work if they don’t have a connection to the controller, you just lose the ability to do any configuration and monitoring, authentication just plods along as normal and the APs coordinate with each other for handoffs and roaming. Never had any issues with PoE capacity.
Aerohive were very flexible about numbers of APs when renewing support. The only slight criticism I’ll have moving from the metal brackets that came with our previous Cisco APs is the mounting brackets are a bit plasticy on the Aerohives and a little bit more fiddly. In a similar vein to Meraki Aerohive will give you a free AP to trial which is worthwhile if you’ve not. David. From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Chris Adams (IT) Sent: 17 May 2018 19:22 To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Options We use Aerohive, we are approaching ~1,900 WAPs across 5 campuses. 2) Our experience with the product has overall been good, we’ve seen good hardware options available and have seen continuous improvement in the management system. The newer system fixes many of our issues with the legacy classic management system such as log retention periods. PPSK has worked very well in our dorms and for IOT devices that don’t play well with dot1x. We love the AP250 with the first radio being SDR, having 2x 5ghz radios on the same WAP has been very beneficial to us. 3) Aerohive has somewhat recently fixed my 2 biggest areas of grief: they now offer a wall plate hospitality WAP which has made some of our dorms much more tenable to upgrade. Additionally, log retention for reporting is improved with NG, we used to only get 3-5 days within hivemanager itself. 5) No fault of Aerohive, but on some 802.3af WAPs, our switches (Aruba/HPE) were allocating the max wattage rather than actual or requested wattage which caused some challenges with power budgeting. This has been circumvented with an obscure CLI command. Cloud-style management rather than controller has been a big key. We ended up adding 4 additional campuses to our original deployment without having to be concerned about rolling extra controller hardware or failover licensing. Only the cost of the WAP hardware and it’s support. We run all of our WAPs on a on-premise VM but since it isn’t required for their operation, we have been able to do mid-day fixes and upgrades without disrupting connectivity. Thanks, Chris Adams, CISSP Assistant CIO, Network & Telecom Division of Information Technology University of North Georgia From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> On Behalf Of John Rodkey Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:10 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Options Our college - about 40 buildings, 1200 students, 3500 wireless clients per day, currently 310 WAPs - is considering a major upgrade in WAPs, replacing a number that are 9 years old and no longer supported. We could replace with the latest model of our existing vendor, but want to consider all the feasible alternatives. We have a hard requirement that the controller be cloud-based, the system deal well with Mac clients, understand VLANs and an enterprise quality network, and have a rich set of configuration, logging, monitoring, and troubleshooting tools for dealing both with clients and access points. Responsive support is also required, and unsurprisingly total system cost is a significant issue. 3 vendors come to mind: Meraki, Ubiquiti, and Aerohive. Questions: 1) do other vendors come to mind that play well in this space? 2) what are your positive experiences with any of the above? 3) what are your negative experiences? 4) have you recently gone through this analysis, and if so, what were your conclusions? 5) what issues have you experienced with PoE capacity requirements with these devices? John Rodkey Director of Servers and Networks Westmont College ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
