Aruba Wireless Reviews

Move valuable to us are the central management feature and the solution's performance. They're also easy to deploy in all our global locations.

We have about 40 offices around the world, and in every office we had a different wireless vendor. Our goal, then, was to have one standard solution for all our offices. Now, for example, when our sales team goes from Singapore to China to Belgium, they can just come into the local office and are automatically connected.

The AP's didn't automatically connect to our central office upon deployment.

We've had some deployment issues, such as the AP's didn't connect to our central office automatically.

It's a stable solution.

It's very scalable. If one of our offices wants extra AP's, we can just ship them and they just need to plug them them. That's it.

Sometime technical support goes directly through Aruba, and other times it goes through a third party.

We were using several different vendors, including Cisco and some old HP's, and we wanted to standardized in all our offices. So, we switched to Aruba and now have central management.

Initial setup was very straightforward. You just plug it in with a few settings.

We didn't look at other solutions as HP is the company standard.

You may need additional tools like ClearPass, for example, from Aruba.

In this University, Wi-Fi is essential to the daily operations, from teaching, learning by staff and students to research by researchers. In recent two years, it contributes to our smart campus objectives, bridging IoT devices in multiple projects. 

With the powerful feature in ClearPass, AirWave, MM and other subsystems, this centrally managed Wi-Fi solution offers the University members and guests a unified user experience, enabling IT staff to administer all component, particularly in search of a technical issue. 

The ClearPass admin console provides an easy operating interface for checking every user's authentication steps, which is pretty useful to identify the root cause of an authentication issue. Also, the self-service portal allows end-users to manage their registered devices. 

Perhaps Aruba should publish some best practices for deploying its solution in different industries. 

Aruba Wi-Fi solution has been a good partner in my University since 2017.

A very powerful Wi-Fi system.

They provide very efficient support.

Aruba solution is not cheap. 

The solution has great integration capabilities.

It offers a lot of helpful common features.

The solution is quite stable and very robust.

The solution is quite expensive. If they could make the cost a bit lower, that would be helpful. It's pricey compared to, for example, D-Link or TP-Link. Other commonly used products offer more competitive pricing.

The solution should offer more simplified tools.

There needs to be better visibility on the day-to-day monitoring.

It would be ideal if they had cloud services whereby you could manage everything from the cloud. This may be on the most current version, however, on older versions, they don't offer this. Even if you deployed on-premises, you should be able to control everything from the cloud.

We've been using the solution for quite some time. It's easily been about five or so years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. It's very robust, in fact. Many enterprises deploy it and they can rely on its stability.

As a solution suitable for enterprises, it can scale quite well. A company should have no trouble expanding it if they need to.

Everyone has their own method of deploying this product. Each company is different. It may be pretty straightforward or more complex depending on an organization's needs.

Their pricing is on-par with Cisco. It's definitely not the cheapest on the market. It's on the higher end in terms of price. For example, you need to purchase extra tools in order to get better monitoring and performance visibility.

We're an Aruba partner. We provide this solution to our customers.

We tend to work with and offer the latest version on the market. The version we have now in our offices is more than five years old at this point. It was the latest version when we installed it.

Would advise anyone considering using Aruba first do a proof of concept. Different environments will have different needs. It's really up to the team and the performance walls that you're looking to test. If your company is pretty simple and small, it may not be necessary to have Aruba. It would be like buying a Ferrari when all you really need is any old car. However, if your organization is looking for a solution that is solid, performance-wise, this may be perfect. It's best to test.  

Also, a company needs to clearly identify their requirements. Do they need the high performance? Are they constrained by costs? All of these questions need to be considered before signing onto a solution. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be done before choosing any product.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. If it offered more free tools and had better day-to-day monitoring, I might rank it higher.

HPE acquired Aruba. I think that was a really interesting acquisition. To be able to combine those product sets, the traditional wire line and the wireless, and then the Clearpass solution from Aruba, is what I'm most interested in; the enterprise security and to have the whole picture.

We're a reseller, so for us, it's another option to present to our customers. We've traditionally had a lot of Cisco networking in our background, so to be able to provide that to our customers is important. We think there are a lot of things changing in the industry right now, in IT, so we want to make sure we're staying ahead of that and helping our customers find the best solutions for things. A lot of things are changing.

I'm very interested, and I've heard really good things about, the SDN solution; the enterprise controller. I'm planning on getting more information on that.

I've been in networking for over 20 years, and I've dealt with some of the traditional HPE ProCurve stuff a while ago. Just recently, my company signed up to do more HPE networking, so I was planning to learn more. Our recent experience is limited with the products; that's in one training class.

It's stable.

I know that we actually have a very large organization that's doing a full HPE rollout right now. We're going to assist with that. It definitely seems very scalable.

So far, so good. I haven't really opened a lot of support cases. I don't do a lot of production support. The pre-sales folks I've talked to so far have been knowledgeable. I've attended a training class and the instructor was good.

We're switching from Cisco. It was an executive decision, that's what I'll say. In those large organizations, that's how that works out sometimes. We're definitely going to help with that.

The product seems pretty good so far.

The most valuable aspects are its security and analytical capabilities.

I think when it comes to wireless the industry has changed a lot. When it comes to wireless, the industry has changed a lot and with connectivity everyone uses the same chips and really the same hardware so the quality of radio is very similar for every vendor.

Aruba have put a lot of emphasis on manageability and security, and I think their Airwave and Clearpath products are head and shoulders the best in the industry. They let their customers deploy a wireless network and manage and secure it better than you can do with all other solutions.

The next step is to create better unified story with HP switching. They're part of the same competitor, and their main competitor, Cisco, has a great unified wired/wireless story, and Aruba need to focus on this. They have great management tools and security capabilities, and they need to extend that to the wireless network.
Also, they need to enable the data they collect to be used by more companies. If you think of where wireless is big - schools, hospitals, retail environments - it would be good to capture that data and share it with third-parties so they can enhance their customers' experience.

It's amongst the best in the industry. It's used by lots of small companies but also by some of the largest companies in the world, and there's only a couple of vendors who can be multi-thousand user wireless deployments, and Aruba's one of them. They have a rock solid solution.

It's highly scalable, and I like the way they have orientated their portfolio. They have a configuration called 'Instant' where you don't actually need a controller, you can just start with a couple of access points and get it at relatively low cost. As you scale it out, you can add more access points, and one or two controllers, and manage it through the cloud. So almost any configuration the customer wants they can do, and as it gets larger, you can bring in the management tools. It's not like some solutions where you have to rip it out to go larger.

I think it's great. I've never heard a customer complain and they get you on the phone with an engineer quickly. Obviously it's very focused on wireless so you're not going to be calling them for a wide range of problems. For the solution, they're very good.

It's easy to get going. You can take an access point out of the box and have it running in minutes.

It's been the tech leader in the wireless market for a long time, which is why HP paid so much for them. Using the product is very simple, and there are lots of features unique to them. If you're going to purchase it - and you will pay a premium so it will cost more - take advantage of the security features, management tools, and analytical features.

The main reason I chose to implement the HP WLC was due to the limitations of our previous Sonicwall WLC not being able to have layer three provisioning. I would say that feature is the most valuable.

With our old wireless network, we had to put controllers at every location to have wireless access. This product allowed us to have one controller at our central location and still provide wireless to our outlying clinics.

The user interface on the product isn’t terribly intuitive in some areas, especially when setting up VSC’s.

I've been using HP MSM 720 Mobility Controller and 40 HP since April 2014, so approximately 10 months.

I experienced a few issues while deploying the controller. Getting the product to work correctly with a back end RADIUS server proved to be a bit of a task and the lack of documentation didn’t help either.

Stability wise the product has been fairly rock solid. I can’t think of any time I have had to even reboot it since I implemented it.

The particular model (MSM 720) doesn’t provide much in terms of scalability. It only allows for 40 Access Points which my company has about that number.

Customer service on the phone I would rate fairly poorly. On more than one occasion I could not understand the agent or would get disconnected, however, online customer service is much better.

I have only used the HP forums for technical support and it has a pretty good following and a lot of knowledgeable users.

We previously used a Sonicwall NSA3500 for all our needs. We switched due to the lack of Layer three provisioning at the time plus I wasn’t a fan of one device controlling so many aspects of our network and security.

I would say complex, mainly due to the lack of good documentation. All together, it took me about a week to fully get the product in a production state. Coming from a Cisco background it seemed much more cumbersome than their products.

We used an in house team (me).

I am not sure of the ROI at the moment. It has not been implemented long enough for any significant ROI.

Original setup cost for this implementation was around $30,000. Day-to-day the product costs nothing.

Any time we have a project we must have three viable options to choose from. We looked at HP, Cisco and Meru.

• Have a strong knowledge of your internal network
• Study the manual as much as possible
• Focus on VSC’s and Vlan configuration
• If you come from a Cisco background keep in mind you won’t use an access port on the switch port connected to the AP like you would in a Cisco WLC setup, but instead either a trunk or tagged port