Aruba Wireless Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is to manage all of our wireless devices.

I like the way it groups and manages access points.

You have to use the command line for a lot of commands but then get back to the GUI for the main actions. A lot of the access point commands are in the command line interface, versus being in the GUI.

Some control systems have the ability to right-click to go to the common line. I would like to see that incorporated onto the interface.

I have been working with Aruba Wireless for three years.

I have almost 1,300 access points and on an average day, I have less than 1% down. I am usually sitting at 100%. This solution is stable.

This solution is very scalable.

The technical support is very good and I haven't had any issues with them. They were pretty responsive.

They had their wireless in place for eight years and I have been here for three. I wasn't a part of the initial decision-making process.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It only takes a few minutes to deploy. I would say that it is about as long as it takes to reboot the access point.

The pricing is reasonable. If you compare it to other solutions then it's reasonably priced.

I think that Aruba Wireless is a great option. I hardly ever have problems with access points and the failover mechanism works well. 

Overall, It's a good solid system.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Aruba Instant in four remote branch offices. We chose this solution at the time because of its controllerless feature and easy setup.

It provided an easy WiFi solution for our branch offices to deploy. We could usually have them up and running from out-of-the-box in about 10 minutes.

The controllerless feature. It will randomly pick one of the APs to be the designated master. If that access point fails, the role is moved to another AP. This saves a lot on management and infrastructure costs.

There is plenty of room for improvement. Reliability of a flawless upgrade after the 4.x releases is rare. There is a lot of manual intervention required lately due to random bugs. If you have a mix of APs using different firmware, it takes nothing short but an act of god to upgrade successfully. 

The product’s performance got worse with newer releases as well. It seems like they are adding more frivolous features and sacrificing stability and speed. The latest design of their APs removes the console port and requires purchasing an expensive proprietary cable just to access the console.

Occasionally, it needed to be rebooted. I used to have issues with DHCP. It is extremely buggy and difficult to upgrade with different firmware versions/models.

I do not know what the maximum number of APs in a cluster can be (for the Instant series), but I never seemed to hit a limit. At one site, we had 12 clustered together.

It seemed to be good when we needed it. This was before HPE purchased them. I have not had a need to contact support since then.

The other way around, we have switched away from Aruba to Ruckus. Aruba’s poor performance and random upgrade issues caused too much time consuming maintenance and troubleshooting. Ruckus Unleashed has been flawless; performance almost doubled, and it is far easier to configure.

The initial setup was very simple. There were some settings which were confusing and unlabeled when trying to use the online help with the newer firmware.

Trial different solutions and compare pricing to how well they perform, their stability, how easy it is to maintain, etc.

At the time when we first started using them, we did not evaluate other options. They seemed to be only ones back then who could cluster APs without requiring a separate controller.

Perform a site survey and get a model that supports the latest AC technology.

At first, the product was a solid 10. As time went on, and newer firmware was released, the product has dropped significantly to maybe a four or five rating out of 10 due to various bugs and design issues. We no longer use Aruba for any new sites and are slowly phasing them out from our locations with a different controllerless product that has drastically increased reliability and performance.

We currently have 500 access points deployed and operated by two controllers. Recently, all of the AP-125 models were replaced as part of a three year site wide upgrade, using AP-205H, AP-215, AP-225, and AP-325 models. 

Our wireless overhaul has reduced the number of wireless related help desk tickets by nearly 90%.

I work in a concrete fortress built 70 years ago. It obviously was not designed with wireless internet in mind. The software available allows me to make very specific changes to individual access points when throttling power/settings, which are critical to good working wireless signals. 

The ARM functionality does not always seem to perform how I would like. In some cases, I have had to manually assign channels to avoid channel confusion. Overall, it is a small task to worry about. 

HPE Aruba technical support is a nine out of 10. 

Quality of the product and the OS interface are a nine out 10.

Clients use Aruba Wireless for their wireless network needs.

We have many customers using the solution, both on-premises and cloud.

The support for both on-premises and cloud deployments has proven to be very effective.

We are not facing any difficulty in convincing customers to have Aruba Wireless, and there are no specific features that customers are particularly looking for in wireless.

I have been using the solution for over ten years.

The solution is very stable. Many customers do not face any complaints about the product or the network going down.

I rate it ten out of ten on scalability.

Technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

I do not know how to calculate our ROI.

Pricing is competitive compared to other companies like Cisco.

I would definitely recommend Aruba Wireless.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I've been a consultant for six years.

Aruba is easier than Juniper.

The stability and management could be improved.

I have been working with Aruba Wireless for five years.

We are currently working with Aruba Wireless but will be changing to Juniper later this year.

When it comes to stability, Cisco is number one. Aruba and Juniper are similar.

Aruba Wireless is a scalable solution.

Technical support is good.

I have been working with Juniper WLC Series for one year. We plan to implement Juniper next month.

The initial setup is very easy.

The pricing is fine.

Cisco is more expensive than Aruba or Juniper.

Aruba has pricing for a Virtual license with a VLAN package.

We decided to change to Juniper because it looked right, and because of the easy management.

I would rate Aruba Wireless a nine out of ten.

Aruba was our primary wireless solution until very recently.  

In the end, when you bring on a wireless solution, you only need a wireless solution. That is the intrinsic value. We had both Aruba ClearPass and Aruba AirWaves. We had all the management features also available from Aruba. These worked well together as a class of products.   

When I compare Aruba with Juniper Mist, Juniper is the more an AI-driven management solution. It is more of a modern solution, I think. Aruba needs to be more competitive with Juniper.  

We have been using Aruba Wireless for four or five years now.  

I think Aruba is stable because it was working okay. There was no problem with downtime. The issue for us with functionality was because we have much more reflection in our building due to the height of our ceilings.  

We bought the product through a reseller. For support, we needed to go through that reseller instead of Aruba self. It is hard to judge the capabilities of Aruba support directly.  

We had Aruba and we just replaced it with Juniper Mist a few weeks ago (September 2020). The AI-driven management solutions from Juniper Mist suits our business more than the Aruba solution we used before. I think Aruba did the work we needed before, but better management is the reason why we moved over to Juniper Mist.  

Before Aruba, we worked with HP Colubris. We stopped using the HP Colubris solution because HP no longer provided it. That is what happened.  

Aruba is comparable to competing solutions when it comes to price. I am going to say that the support pricing for Juniper Mist is higher than Aruba. I think that is because Juniper is more of a cloud model than Aruba.  

You do also have a cloud solution from Aruba called Aruba Central, but I have not compared prices for that.  

The advice that I would give to someone considering Aruba as a wireless solution would be to look into the Aruba Central cloud solution that they are offering right now. I think we are at a time of brand control that needs to be managed and needs to be supported. I think that working with a cloud-based solution is a better option than on-premises solutions.  

I think what is more important than a particular tool is that you also have the depth of wireless knowledge to really be able to competently manage such environments.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as a seven-out-of-ten. To improve on that score they would have to make Aruba more available to cloud management. They just recently started with Aruba Central and they are not as far along as Juniper Mist is with having a mature cloud solution.  

The problem for Aruba is that Juniper Mist is a new product without a longer legacy. They can start from ground zero. Aruba needs to support the older controller-based models and that may slow them down when it comes to development.  

Aruba is moving to the cloud platform model. We are presenting solutions using Aruba Central to clients for the management of their infrastructure. The majority of the implementations we have are still currently are on-premises. Customers now are slowly implementing cloud solutions for Aruba. We have 80% on-premises and 20% migrating to the cloud version of the solution.  

With Aruba Central, we can manage controllers, EAPs (Employee Assistance Programs), switches, et cetera. Everything in one place. So we can manage anything we need to using Aruba. Aruba on-premises wireless is something we use for education. It is mostly implemented in schools and in universities. We use it to establish APs (Access Points)  around the campus to make sure there is coverage campus-wide. Then they have mobility controllers on-premises that control all the infrastructure.  

Another use case is for companies that have branches from the data centers. At the prime location, they have APs powered within the company and Mobility Masters in the data center. The Mobility Masters cluster-connect to the mobility controllers and then control all the APs and all the wireless infrastructure. Then we have links connecting the branches. On the branches, we have small mobility controllers that feed all the information to and from Mobility Masters. That is, the Mobility Masters connect to mobility controllers and then the mobility controllers connect to the APs.  

Portugal is a small country and our smallest companies always have EAPs. EAPs are a version of a solution from Aruba that the NAC (Network Access Control) AP has inside a virtual controller. These NAC APs control all the other APs.  

It gives us a reliable, mature solution that we can roll out to our clients.  

Wireless technologies, relatively speaking, are a new solution. The technical guys from Aruba are very good. The support is very good. It is very easy to implement the product. Another solution that Aruba has is the NAC and the ClearPass. ClearPass is a good solution for additional security of access points and it is integrated so it is very easy to deploy. It is very interactive and not so analytic as other solutions so, in my opinion. Aruba is a very good company — very good technology-wise — and they make very useful products.  

Perhaps one of the things that I think Aruba can improve on is developing their current information channels. Aruba has a lot of information available about their products and to find the information you need is not always so easy. It is more complicated than it should be. I think that they are great and do have a lot of information available — probably all the information that any user really needs to do things themselves. They are doing things well and trying to do things in the right way. They should just improve more on the organization and searchability of the information to make it easier to find what you are looking for.  

I am with the sales service for Arrow, Portugal which is a solutions company. My role is to help the partners in designing solutions. I am working with Aruba products as a partner and reseller for three years now.  

Aruba Wireless is stable. Very stable. Because Aruba has already been around for more than 10 years or so, it is a mature product and a very stable product. If there is a problem, the support team is very good with working through the problems. When a client wants a new version, we have confidence in Aruba that everything has already tested and we have access to stable versions of the release. We have access to all the information for the versions whether they are the old ones or the new ones.  

My impressions about the scalability and the product is that it is highly scalable. You can start with a low quantity of access points — as low as one installation — and then scale it to thousands if you have to. You can do the upgrades in the mobility controllers to allow the growth of the infrastructure. Because of the way it is created, it is highly scalable and highly reliable.  

Of course, we have plans to scale our own usage of the product. Because we work as a value-added distributor of Aruba in Portugal, we have to meet the needs of our client base which is growing all the time. We have plans to increase the implementation of the product in our market to meet those demands. It is partly because we are working with a superior product like Aruba that we are growing in our market.  

The Aruba technical support team is very good. They are very skilled people and can help you with the support you need when it comes to their products. They are very good at turning around a response within 24 hours. It is fast and helpful.  

In my experience the initial setup of the Aruba EAP solution is straightforward. We can call on all the APs and then you have everything connected. Now they also have a Soho gateway solution that it is integrated. It is very easy to turn on this solution. I can install the Soho add-on instantly for the Aruba solution. I think that they are doing very well to keep the customer in mind when building and testing their products for ease of setup and use.  

Our deployment did not take a very long time. Even initially. For clients, the deployment takes more or less time than ours. It depends on the size of the implementation. If you have to do only 10 APs in a small deployment, it can take only two or three days to complete the whole thing. If you have a bigger implementation, it depends on the size of the project. It could take weeks for the deployment if it is a very large one.  

We did not have to use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for our deployment. We could do that ourselves. But we do work with all the integrators in Portugal because we help them to sell the solution so that they can implement it for the clients. We help them sell the product and then they do the deployments.  

The advice I would give to a customer that wants to implement this product is that they must have good support from a product partner. Try to find a certified partner to do the job of planning and implementation. This should be a certified HP partner to do the job as Aruba is an HP company. Choose the right partner, the right technical guy, and the right company to implement the solution for you. It will make sure you have the solution deployed in the way you need it to be done to fit your needs and expectations. That is the most important thing that I can think of.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine-and-a-half.  

We have used Aruba Wireless, with an Alcatel-Lucent logo, as the wireless connection for our office and guest users for nine to ten years.

We just use Aruba Wireless to provide our wireless connections.

The most valuable feature of Aruba Wireless is application monitoring. I can choose which application can connect. You can select the menus. It's very important that it's easy.

Aruba Wireless has already improved all that we need. There is a new version, 8.x, that provides a mobility controller. They probably upgraded their cloud servers. 

We have Mobility Manager. The idea is to have a mobility-based machine that can manage a controller around the company.

For a more senior tool, a local application monitoring related to IoT vendors would be useful. Because the company is stable, they have good quality.

Aruba Wireless is stable. Now we don't have any issues. In the early versions, there were problems, but now all is okay. They've advanced a long time ago.

With Aruba Wireless you can scale to 10,000 IPs. It's very scalable. In our office, we use around 100. We have customers around the world. 

We use Aruba Wireless with thousands of internal users in our office. We resell the product around the globe, so we have thousands of people connected. No extra staff is required to maintain the installation.

We use web resources to fix problems or for the recovery of data. We start around the Aruba network site. We found out the solution to recovering data there. 

We don't escalate issues to technical support. We have a lot of support here with our team.

The initial set up of Aruba Wireless is in the middle, i.e. not so easy and not so complex. You need to learn to understand the process through the provided documentation.

We installed Aruba Wireless by our internal team, as we resell their products.

We saw an ROI. We are looking for eventually replacing Alcatel-Lucent because it's a senior to Huawei and Aruba. 

With Huawei, you are talking about an enterprise solution. With Aruba, you are talking about a standard solution. Hopefully, we will take the best of each of the previous vendors.

We do not have a leased license with Aruba Wireless. We bought ours earlier. We don't use the cloud solution of Aruba. We bought the license for life. We don't rent the license or pay a monthly fee.

We are looking at Stellar solutions currently as an alternative: OmniAccess Stellar solutions. The new product line from Alcatel is what we are using for it.

Aruba Wireless is very expensive. They changed a lot of models in the last two years. The cost has increased quite a lot in my local area. 

Other than costs, it depends on whether you have a discount on the license. Aruba Wireless changed all of the portal payments a couple of years ago. This created some issues. 

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the product with an eight.