Hi all, I read this thread with some trepidation, since we're just finishing up a rollout of 150 AP515s on 7205s. We chose this platform after a nearly 6 month PoC, because we were hitting a high-impact but low occurrence and unreproducible bug with our Surface Book 2 fleet when connected to our Extreme Wireless network. Microsoft was unable to fix this bug (and it definitely was a client bug, their debug traces showed the Surfaces dropping BAR packets from the AP), so instead I hope they can fix the new bug we found the Surfaces have with Aruba APs, which is low-impact but occurs frequently (several times a minute) and so is highly reproducible. More on the Surface bugs below, but I had also seen the Aruba bug where the client loses connectivity for 5 minutes or so, HE was disabled at the time. It's easiest to spot this in Airwave, there will be a period of no traffic transferred for the client. We didn't have any problem reports in the last few weeks of testing though, while running on 8.5.0.3, so maybe it was fixed? The user group (Maths teachers) were very good in reporting issues, although not always in a timely fashion. Our new production install is running 8.5.0.5 but I'll probably be upgrading to 8.6.0.1 before the teachers get back from summer holiday.
I will strongly agree with the others in this thread who have posted that the support of your local partner and vendor TAC and account team should be high on your consideration. The PoC was a tortured process, definitely not helped by the fact that the partner's engineers were in another state, and the local Aruba SE had just left, and a new one wasn't hired until October or so. I've also found Aruba TAC to be not great in my brief experience with them, certainly not compared to Extreme GTAC where I have on several occasions dealt directly with a developer, including one instance where we bisected code one evening to identify what change caused 2.4GHz to not work on AP3825s. The Aruba SE from another state did visit and let me know we should have set ReversePathFwdCheckPromisc on the ESXi host, as we were seeing connectivity problems that were DHCP related, and that was the fix. It is documented, but only in the appendix of the install guide https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/install-guide/virt-appl/appendix/nic-team-vswi.htm and not in the version that Google returns as the first result. That was 2 months of frustration right there, and partly why for the production deployment I insisted on physical controllers (although the mobility master is a VM). In terms of my (probably ill-informed) view of the competitive landscape, I've seen an Aerohive demo after Extreme acquired them and was very impressed, but unfortunately they couldn't get me demo APs in time to do testing before exams started. I believe WiNG isn't going away, given the large customers who use it. Their latest APs run the same wireless code and can be managed by Aerohive^WExtremeCloud IQ, WiNG or XCA, your choice. Cisco, well WLC is legacy and the 9800 series might be nice, but I'm yet to hear a good word about DNA Center. It's a beast, it needs 56 cores, 256GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, and it's not supported as a VM (although people have made it work http://blog.vpnv4.com/dna-center-esxi-installation-guide/ ). Meraki, I don't like their business model. Aruba, well, we chose it in part because Microsoft use it internally and that prevents them blaming the wireless when we're getting them to fix their drivers. Mist I've never used, Ruckus have always had great wireless performance and with CloudPath are getting their authentication piece in order. Which brings me to another point, consider the vendor's other offerings like management systems and RADIUS servers. I've already said my piece about DNA-C, and Airwave seems to have barely changed since I last used it 8 years ago. Extreme XMC is ok. I've run out of time today to expound upon the problems with the Surface wifi chipset, but it seems there is an underlying problem that then causes different high level problems depending on the AP - I've seen three different bad behaviours on Extreme, Aruba and Cisco. We've got 200 Surface Pro 7s with Intel AX201 chipsets which I'll hopefully Thanks, -- James Andrewartha Network & Projects Engineer Christ Church Grammar School Claremont, Western Australia Ph. (08) 9442 1757 Mob. 0424 160 877 On 10/1/20 12:15 am, Turner, Ryan H wrote: > We’ve been an Aruba shop for a very long time and have around 10,000 > access points. While every relationship with vendors have their ups > and downs, my frustration with the Aruba is finally peaking to the > point that I am considering making the enormous move to choose a > different vendor. The biggest reason is with the 8.X code train, and > bugs that we just don’t consider appropriate to use in production. It > has been one thing after the other, and my extremely talented and > qualified Network Architect (Keith Miller) might as well be on the > Aruba payroll as much work as he has been doing for them to solve > bugs. Just when we think we have one fixed, another one crops up. > > > > The big one as of late is with 515s running 8.5 code train. We have > them deployed in one of our IT buildings. Periodically, people that > are connected to these APs in the 5G band will stop working. To the > user, they are browsing a site, then it becomes unresponsive. If they > are on their phone, they will disconnect from wifi and everything > works fine on cell. Nothing makes an 802.11 network look worse than > switching to cell and seeing a problem resolve. Normally, if the > users disconnect then reconnect, their problems will go ahead (but I > think they end up connecting in the 2.4G band). We’ve been working > on this problem with them for months. It always seems as though we > have to prove there is a real issue. I’m fed up with it. We are a > sophisticated shop. If we have a problem, 9 times out of 10 when we > bring it to the vendor, it is a real problem. I’m extra frustrated > that due to issues we’ve seen in ResNet on the 8.3X train that we > don’t want to abandon our 6 train on main campus. To Aruba’s credit, > we purchased around 1,000 515s last year (I think around February). > When they could not get good code to support them on, Aruba bought > back half of them. I asked for them to buy back half because I > thought for sure with the 315s that we would have instead, the issues > would be fixed by the time the 315s ran out. Not looking to be the case. > > > > So, with that rant over, we are seriously considering looking to move > away from Aruba (unless they get their act together really soon). > There are other bugs I’m not even mentioning here. For those of you > that made the switch to another vendor, I would be curious how long > the honeymoon lasted, what were your motivators, and were you happy > with the overall results? Of course, this is a great opportunity to > plug your vendor. As I see it, we have 3 choices…. Something from > Cisco (we had Cisco long ago and dumped them for bugs), something from > Extreme (we are a huge Extreme shop so this makes sense), something > from Juniper (Mist). > ********** 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
