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
