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
<[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Steve Fletty
*Sent:* Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:20 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*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 <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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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