++1 on Aruba We hit Matt’s first point and worked with Aruba to rectify the issues. Their QA testing at that time said the 125s were OK but we found out they behave differently in a real world environment where there is interference. We got an official apology from QA along with assurances they were changing their testing environment to include interference testing.
This summer we are actually expanding our Aruba deployment to include an LPV football stadium as well as introducing HPE Aruba switches into our Cisco environment I am quite surprised someone is moving from Aruba wireless to Cisco, especially when comparing features and cost. Bruce Osborne Senior Network Engineer Network Operations - Wireless (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 From: Matt Freitag [mailto:mlfre...@mtu.edu] Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:50 PM Subject: Re: Wireless Options Another +1 on Aruba. We've also had varying experiences with their support but they are mostly positive experiences. The two negative experiences I had with their support went about like this: * AP-125's spontaneously crash and reboot due to a memory management bug with no workaround. This went on for months while we were already replacing our AP-125's anyway because those went end-of-support a while ago, but their engineering group took months to release a fix to us. * One single CPU in our data path module in our 7240s goes to 100% and causes authentication timeouts, increased ping times from our network monitor to our APs to the point that the network monitor says they're down, and users experience terribly slow connectivity. We saw the issue most when people were changing classes and increasing the load on the controller a lot with handling all the associations and disassociations, and the workaround roughly equated to "split the load between our controllers" which just hid the issue, and then when that began to fail us our school year ended and we haven't seen the issue since. We expect to see this again in the fall if Aruba doesn't release the fix to us over the summer. We've had a ticket open with them since October. Overwhelmingly positive experience I had with their support tho: all APs on our campus would spontaneously reboot. Turns out this was due to a very well malformed UDP packet reaching the controller over the GRE tunnel between controller and AP causing the AP management process on the controller to hang. Since it was hung, the process stopped responding to heartbeat requests from the APs, APs would think the controller is down and reboot. Fix was enable control plane security which enables an IPSec tunnel between the APs and controller and IPSec packet validation mechanisms recognized the bad packets causing the bug as bad packets and silently discarded them which resolved our issue. Side note for all the Aruba users, I personally recommend enabling cpsec on your controllers just to avoid this scenario and encrypt your user traffic on its way to the controller. Doing this will cause all your APs to reboot to establish tunnels to the controllers. Double check with your SE and/or Aruba TAC to check if there are any caveats to doing this in your environment but we've got 1,400 APs and are approaching 10k active users during the school year and haven't had a problem. Back to the topic at hand: overall we've found the product itself is very stable and works well. We also stick with the conservative release branch because, while that branch doesn't have all the latest features, it's got all the stability and we're huge fans of stability here. The APs are easy to set up, reasonably priced, also solidly stable, the feature set you do have with your chosen release works well, etc. etc. Matt Freitag Network Engineer Information Technology Michigan Technological University (906) 487-3696<tel:%28906%29%20487-3696> https://www.mtu.edu/ https://www.mtu.edu/it On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Pramod Bhardwaj <bhard...@middlesex.mass.edu<mailto:bhard...@middlesex.mass.edu>> wrote: I recommend Aruba as well, we moved to Aruba last year from Meru and very happy with it and no complaints for anyone so far. We have about 260 APS on both the campuses Pramod Principal Manager of IT Infrastructure MCC (978) 656-3308 From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> On Behalf Of James Moskwa Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:22 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Options You need to include Aruba in your list. Regards, -- Jim Sr. Network Engineer Information Technology Department Johnson & Wales University 8 Abbott Park Place<https://maps.google.com/?q=8+Abbott+Park+Place+%0D%0A+Providence,+RI+02903+%0D%0A+Office:+401&entry=gmail&source=g> Providence, RI 02903<https://maps.google.com/?q=8+Abbott+Park+Place+%0D%0A+Providence,+RI+02903+%0D%0A+Office:+401&entry=gmail&source=g> Office: 401<https://maps.google.com/?q=8+Abbott+Park+Place+%0D%0A+Providence,+RI+02903+%0D%0A+Office:+401&entry=gmail&source=g>-598-1556 Mobile: 401-249-0579 eFax: 401-223-4998 Email: james.mos...@jwu.edu<http://james.mos...@jwu.edu/> Visit JWU Gateway<https://gateway.jwu.edu/> to submit a ticket, get University forms, and more! From: EDUCAUSE Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> on behalf of John Rodkey <rod...@westmont.edu<mailto:rod...@westmont.edu>> Reply-To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>> Date: Thursday, May 17, 2018 at 2:10 PM To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <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. ********** 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.
