Aruba Switches Reviews

Aruba switches are divided into many categories: core, distribution, access, and small switches called Instant On. Small businesses and home users use those. We use 6400 Aruba switches, which are core switches that support the new CX operating system. We also use distribution switches such as the 8300 and category access layers such as the 6100, 6200, and 6300. There are many Aruba category switches in access layers and Instant On switches for small offices, such as Aruba Instant On 1930 and 1960.

We have set up Aruba switches for customers in Egypt's hospitality, and oil and gas industries.

With Aruba, I like its stability and lifetime warranty. I haven't seen any other vendors provide a lifetime warranty, which is the most preferred benefit with Aruba switches. Moreover, Aruba gives all its features from day one without any extra license.

Aruba offers VSX with its core switch. It is a redundancy. A call configured between two core switches or two distribution switches makes the two switches active for working. We can connect servers with the two core switches, and the connectivity between the server and the core switch is 20 gigabits with active forwarding. Other vendors provide this feature, but for data center switches, not LAN switches. This is a big feature with Aruba at layer code and distribution. At access, Aruba provides logically stacking switches. Especially the new 6000 series, which has the CX operating system. The CX operating system has logical stacking. Logical stacking does not require any modules.

If we compare Aruba and Cisco at the data center layer, Cisco has its Nexus switch. Aruba provides the new 10000 series, but it does not compare with the Nexus switch. Aruba is in networks but still not in data centers since their data center switches are not as good as Cisco's.

Aruba should enhance its performance and management solution to manage Aruba and non-Aruba switches. Aruba needs better layer management or a software management solution. When we talk about Aruba Central, the integration with the management software is not good enough. When we need to push a configuration in a switch, Aruba Central can manage Aruba access switches only. We work with the Aruba OS for normal management, but the CX switches are for monitoring only. Aruba'a management solution is a weak point. Management solutions are a weak point for other vendors, too, but we need to enhance Aruba to be better than other vendors.

I've worked with Aruba switches for around five years.

Aruba is very stable now but was not very stable seven years ago. I haven't seen anyone suffering from Aruba's stability.

Aruba switches are very easy to scale.

If the customer doesn't buy an SLA, support may arrive after two weeks or one month. It also depends on the stock availability.

Regarding tech support, levels one and two are not skilled enough. They can support normal issues, but not if we have abnormal or new issues. We have engineers with more experience.

The product is easy to set up. A single engineer with a certificate for Cisco switches can work with Aruba switches because it is the same thing. They can manage Aruba using the CLI or the GUI.

The time taken to deploy Aruba switches depends on the number of switches, such as if the customer has one or two core switches. It also depends on the distribution of the switches, whether they are distributed around the network in the company or at the same center as the customer. It also depends on whether the customer has more than one data center or more than one rack.

If the customer needs only one core switch, deploying it takes two to four hours. But that also depends on the number of the LANs and the number of points connected to the core switch.

You can divide the tool's maintenance into two parts: whether maintenance requires hardware, spare parts, hardware RMA, or if it requires configuration. Configuration depends on the engineers' skill, while spare parts depend on the vendor and if the customer buys an SLA.

Aruba switches work without a license. A license is needed when working with a management solution, but not for enabling switch features. This is a big feature of Aruba, making it better than other vendors. For example, we need to buy a license to enable features with Cisco. Aruba's features exist in a datasheet of any switch, available from day one without a license.

SLAs are available for 24 hours or four hours.

If a customer doesn't have experience with Aruba switches, they can work with Aruba after limited job training. We provide on-the-job training for customers, after which they can work in an environment with Aruba switches.

I recommend the product to enterprise and small business customers. I recommend it to hospitality and oil and gas customers. We can recommend Aruba to any customer with a LAN or enterprise network. Aruba has features such as a lifetime warranty. In Egypt, a lifetime warranty is a very effective feature. Other competitors do not provide the same.

Along with a lifetime warranty, we get scalability and stability, and we can enable any feature without a license. Aruba switches integrate with other vendors. Aruba can work with Cisco or other vendors. For example, if we have Cisco or any other platform to run ciphers, they can work in Aruba switches. I can integrate it with any management solution, which is a valuable feature. If any customer has switches from Cisco, for example, they need to buy a management solution. The customer is forced to get the software. But if the customer has Cisco switches and is asking about integration between the old and the new network, it won't be an issue to integrate it with Aruba's solution.

I rate Aruba switches a nine out of ten.

We use Aruba switches, access points, and everything. We're a hospital chain. We've deployed them in at least 78 of our hospitals and are happy with the performance.

Overall, we're satisfied with the performance of our Aruba switches. They're working well for our current needs.

Our uptime has been flawless since implementing Aruba switches. 

We haven't had any issues expanding our network infrastructure with Aruba switches. Scalability and integration are excellent. I'd rate them nine out of ten.

The advantage I found is that they can be used as both on-premises devices and cloud-managed devices, with the option for an additional license to become cloud devices. This flexibility is very valuable to us.

There is room for improvement in the pricing because the Aruba Central licenses add a high cost.

I have been using it for the past couple of years, specifically the 2930 model.

It's very stable. I'd rate it a nine out of ten, with ten being highly stable. We haven't had any issues so far, so I'm happy with it.

We haven't had any scaling issues, so I'd rate it a nine out of ten, with ten being highly scalable. 

I have 19 people using it. They are network engineers who maintain the switches.

The network is our core business, so we use it constantly. It's always configured and running in our hospitals.

We haven't had the need to open a technical support ticket yet. Everything has gone smoothly so far.

We had a heterogeneous network with Aruba and Cisco switches. Both worked fine, but we switched to Aruba for cost reasons.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy. 

The deployment itself shouldn't take long. Our network team handles it, and I haven't heard any complaints about the deployment process.

An HP partner did the deployment for us, and we just handled the configuration. They applied everything, and we took care of the authentication procedures and access points.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive. The hardware itself is reasonable, but the licensing can be a bit expensive especially the Aruba Central licenses.

It's good overall. However, I plan to implement centralized management, which might slightly increase the licensing cost. But beyond that, it's been very positive.

So, if I consider stability, I would rate it a ten out of ten because I never faced any issues at all. But regarding cost, especially the licensing, Aruba needs to consider how that impacts your budget. Maybe somewhere between seven out o ten, compared to Meraki switches.

I use them myself, and I sell them to my customers.

Users have to see it as a fabric completely. It’s not only one product. It’s the mixture and the association with the product.

The switches themselves do have security features. But most of it is in conjunction with the others.

The most significant features are their reliability and the options to change the ASICs. You can change a lot internally to improve performance.

For my personal use and experience, the documentation is very good. It’s very good documentation because the majority of American documentation, no matter if it’s a network product or other product, is always very good. It has been for even other products, not just IT products. And Aruba’s documentation is very well done.

It’s very well compared to some other documentation on the market from other manufacturers.

There’s always space for improvement. Improvements are mainly minor in handling, like the web interface. They make some improvements. In terms of performance, they make a lot of improvements in the backplane. These small improvements could make life easier.

I have been working with Aruba products since 2005. 

It is very scalable. I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

Technical support is very good. They’re very responsive, and it’s quite good.

Positive

It’s just a matter of some people preferring Cisco, some people preferring other brands. It’s just a way to convince a customer to change from a product. You need a good selling strategy.

In the professional world, you have different areas. You have very much Cisco-associated companies, and you have the former HPE ProLiant, which is now Aruba. Then you have Juniper, and you have different worlds. Customers have different preferences. So that is an issue now. You have to have a lot of good arguments to convince somebody to change a product.

Consider this: If you have a global operating, let’s say, a European-wide operating company, and they have already invested a lot of money in Cisco, for instance, it is almost impossible to convince them unless you keep exact records of when something was implemented. You need to keep track on a time scale and say, “Okay, now it’s about time to change the system.” You have to be at the right time at the right spot. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to convince them. It’s easier to convince smaller companies.

The initial setup is quite easy. Once you know what you do, it’s easy. If you don’t know what you do, especially with the latest software type, with the CX software type, it’s a bit more difficult. You have to do a little bit more command line. But once you know what you do, it’s quite easy and straightforward.

It is also easy to integrate it with other solutions. 

For the customers, we mainly sell them and implement them. That is our main aim. Our own switches work very reliably. They are a few years old, but they still do what they’re supposed to do.

Sometimes, the license is a bit too overpaid. Sometimes, the license is okay.

Overall, the pricing strategy is fairly reasonable.

Since I’m an Aruba partner, we have project prices.  

The switches themselves, on a hardware level, are about eight out of ten. They all play in the same league, the upper league or the Champions League. There’s nothing negative about them. It’s a question of philosophy.

It’s my philosophy to recommend the best of the breed. Sometimes, I do recommend products from different manufacturers. If I’m convinced another product is more suitable for the project or the customer, then I will recommend that product.

I would definitely recommend Aruba to other users. 

We are business partners for various small and medium enterprises. We get requests from customers for an existing network upgrade or a new field requirement. Based on the customer's requirement, we provide solutions from Aruba or whichever the customer wants.

Aruba has a good switching solution. It has some basic security features and full switching features for the company. It’s not used as a security device, but it has some basic features like configuring ACL. However, it cannot be used as a complete security solution.

The primary thing our clients look for in Aruba, or HPE now since HP acquired Aruba, is cost-effectiveness. Aruba is a good choice if the customer has budget limitations. We recommend Aruba switches because they are less expensive than Cisco but still provide the same features.

Aruba should be made more user-friendly.

We have been using Aruba Switches for a long time. 

The stability is good since I haven’t experienced any major critical issues.

It is a scalable solution. 

HPE provides good support for Switches.

Neutral

The deployment of Aruba Switches is not tricky.

Managing Aruba switches isn’t very difficult. It should be easy to handle if you have hands-on experience with Cisco switches.

The cost depends on the requirement. An extensive network will expand the budget. The price will be lower if there is a small requirement of one to ten switches. In comparison, Aruba is less costly than Cisco by about 10-20%.

I haven't used any AI analytics features with it yet, but the latest switches include cloud AI features.

In comparison to Aruba, Cisco is very user-friendly. Aruba could be more user-friendly since I am accustomed to working with Cisco.

I would recommend Aruba Switches to others and rate it seven out of ten.

We use this product for network access, including setting up VLANs.

The most valuable feature is that it's very easy to configure. Aruba is comparable to Cisco in this regard, and we are comfortable with them. Huawei Ethernet Switches are also easy to configure but we are less comfortable with them.

We can easily connect access points to these switches, and there are no major issues.

The delivery time for this product is slow and is something that needs to be improved. This is the biggest challenge in the market right now.

We have been using Aruba Switches for between 10 and 12 years.

This is a stable product.

Aruba Ethernet Switches are scalable. We have approximately 200 users.

The technical support for Aruba is good.

I also work with different models of Cisco Ethernet Switches, such as the Catalyst 2960-X series, and the Catalyst 2960-X-24TS-L.

Another product that I have experience with is Huawei. We are most comfortable with Aruba and Cisco switches, configured for use as VLANs.

The cost of Aruba switches is higher than that of Huawei and many other brands.

Aruba switches are easy to set up and we have had no issues with them.

Aruba switches cost between $500 and $600 more than similar products by Huawei, as well as many other brands. 

My advice for anybody who is interested in using Aruba switches is that they are easy to configure. In a normal network environment, we have almost zero complaints about them.

Many of their switches support power over ethernet (POE).

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The 5400 series is a modular chassis-based switch and it allows us to buy parts for different needs, such as 10 gigs, or a one gig ethernet over copper for workstations. It's really our core switch and we actually have a couple of different models.

That's in our headquarters, and then we have some other sites that use Aruba. I think they're the 2600 series or 2700 series, the smaller, modular ones, and stackable ones. Not the chassis-based.

When I first started two years ago, we didn't have these centralized modular switches and we had a bunch of stackable switches and there were many loops in the network.

We had different brands too. HP, Cisco, Linksys, Aruba, we had NETGEAR. There was not a common type of interface. We had network issues almost weekly.

We were able to get it organized and centrally managed, with a spanning tree to detect loops and more.

All of the networking products that we use are Aruba, so we use Aruba Central to manage them. This gives us a single place to look at land switches, wireless switches, and switches in other offices. It makes management a little easier.

It's the same type CLI commands to manage these.

There are many options with the modular switch and you buy cards for it. If you want 48 ports of one gig, you can buy a card for that, but more options would be better.

Right now, there's only eight, an eight-port, 10 gig module and sometimes we need a little denser than eight ports. It would be good if I could get a 24-port, 10 gig module.

We have been using Aruba Switches for two years.

The Aruba Switches are very stable. We keep it up to date.

We update the firmware and software annually, as needed. We haven't had any issues. They are relatively new.

Aruba Switches scale well, because of the modularity of it and to be able to buy different modules and interchange modules. We have a pair of them and they are linked together with 40 gig connections, so all of the cards are interchangeable between the two switches and some of that is just by design.

These are the core switches in our organization and everybody in the office uses them. This includes our remote offices. Everybody passes data through them, albeit this is somewhat less at the moment because of the COVID quarantine.

I have not had to contact technical support.

We had a mix of modular switches at this company. We had some HP, Cisco, NETGEAR, and Linksys. We looked at the switches that can provide us the port density that we needed, in one or two chassis-type units, and was also affordable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price point was a big consideration for us and it is reasonable enough that we're able to standardize on Aruba for the networking pieces in our organization. This also includes Wi-Fi and access points.

Generally speaking, the price is good.

Overall, this is a good, solid tool. It doesn't do anything fancy but it does what we need it to do. We don't do any routing through it. We have other routers to do all of that work. Again, the modular flexibility was a big attraction for us.

I've used Switches forever, so I knew what to expect. There was no installation really needed. We knew how to set up VLAN and set up the interfaces. We're happy with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use cases for Aruba Switches are for campus networks and data center stackable switch solutions.

Aruba Switches have provided significant improvements to my organization by offering robust networking solutions without the need for additional licenses.

The most valuable features of Aruba Switches include the dual control plane, stackable features such as stack V6 and VSF stacks. Additionally, the switches work with all necessary features out of the box, without requiring additional licenses.

Aruba Switches don't need licenses to activate features and work straight out of the box, which is an advantage over some competitors. This implies less room for complaints compared with other solutions.

I have used Aruba Switches for about five years.

The stability of Aruba Switches is high, as rated ten out of ten.

Aruba Switches offer high scalability, receiving a ten out of ten rating.

The customer service and support from Aruba are rated ten out of ten.

Positive

We work with Cisco and Juniper where extra licenses are often needed to activate features, which is not the case with Aruba Switches.

The initial setup was easy.

Aruba Switches are rated six out of ten when it comes to pricing, which means they might be more affordable compared with other vendors since they do not require additional licensing for features.

Other solutions that could be evaluated include Microsoft tools, AWS, and Juniper.

I recommend Aruba Switches as they are more affordable compared to other vendors and do not require additional licensing for our customers.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use a suite of core, edge, and top-of-rack switches, and all of them do their jobs. We don't have servers anymore, so the top-of-rack switches don't do much, but the core and edge switches are excellent.

It's an excellent product. They're high-quality switches, and nothing has failed in the time that we've had them. 

Aruba's management suite has some room for improvement.

We've been using Aruba Switches for nearly two years. I'm the IT manager. I organize people to install and support solutions. I didn't do it myself, but I was responsible for procuring the switches. 

Aruba switches are high-quality products. They're well made and never go wrong. They work 100 percent 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, nonstop, with no failures at all — not even a broken fan. What else could I want from a product? 

Scalability is not really relevant to us because we only have 250 users. We used to have 250 users on four floors, so we had eight switches. We're on one floor in one building now, but we still use eight switches to spread the users out. 

Nothing has ever failed, so I've never used their technical support.

A vendor installed the switches for us, and it was straightforward. It didn't take long to install the first time, and it was done well the second time when we moved buildings. 

We have a managed service contract for maintenance. One vendor handles all of our network and desktop support, but I know they only have one network specialist. We had one person perform the installation, and one person provided the support.

Aruba's switches are priced significantly better than Cisco's. They're well placed in the market.

I rate Aruba Switches eight out of 10. I never give any solution a 10. I'm sure they could improve a little bit, but they've been flawless from our point of view. 

Aruba is significantly cheaper than Cisco, we've had no issues. Everything about them has been excellent for us.