I can't say I love ClearPass (we use it) and the recent relicensing felt very much like yet another revenue grab. Not sure the grass is totally greener anywhere. If Mist would tone down the buzzword-driven marketing and start highlighting real-world value proposition and case studies of very large accounts, that could be interesting. Likewise, if Ubiquiti could get their enterprise approach together and stop feeling so wonky on the company side, they too could be interesting. I'll admit there where we use cloud-managed in our branches, I LOOOOOOOVE no keeping up controllers or NMS systems, as I've had years where I have spent months dealing with bugs on both.
I do wish every WLAN company CEO would remind themselves that there are end users at the end of the string out there, and that stability trumps feature bloat and that phrases like "our new blood-sucking licensing insures you have access to INNOVATION!" just sound desperate. (Oh, and I want a pony, too!) -Lee -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> On Behalf Of Osborne, Bruce W (Network Operations) Sent: Friday, August 24, 2018 7:53 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Cisco - Field Notice - 70253 - Wireless Client Fails to Associate: AID Error Actually Aruba has moved from the "HA Pair" structure to a Cluster structure in AOS 8. We have 8 controllers in our Campus Cluster. Actually, the AP, SSID, & client can all be on different controllers within the cluster, each with a designated backup controller. Since our cluster is split between 2 data centers, we have grouped the controllers so the standby is always in the opposite data center to the active one chosen. Bruce Osborne Senior Network Engineer Network Operations - Wireless (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 -----Original Message----- From: Joachim Tingvold [mailto:joac...@tingvold.com] Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2018 10:21 AM Subject: Re: Cisco - Field Notice - 70253 - Wireless Client Fails to Associate: AID Error On 23 Aug 2018, at 15:48, Jeffrey D. Sessler wrote: > It’s great to hear Aruba is adding features such as “automated RF > management” that Cisco has had for over a decade. My understanding of the “automated RF management” part is directly related to the upgrade process (and not DCA/TPC, as you’re suggesting, which Aruba has had for some time). It splits the APs automatically into groups based on their channel assignment (since, given similar approach as DCA, this gives a rough estimation on “APs that are overlapping each other” — could also be improved in the future using signal strength an AP sees other APs). It then moves clients off of one of those groups (making them join other, adjacent APs), reloading those clientless APs into the new software version, and then moves clients back when it moves onto the next “channel group”. Cleanse and repeat until all groups are done, giving you “zero downtime”. This is at least how it was last time I read about it, and is by far superior to the way Cisco does it (where you manually have to fiddle with groups within Prime — and that’s without talking about Prime itself…). The Cisco-solution also requires a separate controller to do this, whilst Aruba uses it’s redundant controller by automatically handling “splitting” the HA-pair (by upgrading one of them, moving the APs according to the “channel groups”, and then finally upgrading the last controller). The “equivalent” with Cisco would be to split your HA pair manually, move all APs to one of them, upgrade the other, move them using the rolling-AP-group-thingie in Prime, then upgrade the last, and finally join them back as a HA, causing significantly more downtime than a normal Cisco upgrade process. Or you could buy a completely separate WLC to achieve this, but that’s somewhat a waste of money if you already do HA/SSO (and buy WLCs in pairs). > In all seriousness,. if you’re talking specifically about AP updates, > cisco has had AP code pre-download for years, resulting in between 2 > to 4 minutes downtime when rebooting a multi-thousand AP controller. > Not hitless, but low impact for sure. I’ve never managed to do less than ~400 seconds on HA/SSO-enabled 8540s with 3k+ APs. That’s “a lot of time” many places (maybe not edu, but for sure in healthcare or other mission-critical businesses), which would be reduced to whatever time it takes for a client to re-associate after being “kicked” off the network (so time depends on the client, but would probably be sub-1s in many cases). -- Joachim ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
