ArubaOS vs. Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Aruba Wireless works quite well and is stable for enterprise. Once it's running, it works. Once you have it set up, you don't normally need to go in and make changes. Aruba is particularly good on pushing clients to use 5ghz (they say they use some kind of a proprietary algorithm). It may not be appropriate for smaller businesses due to cost and complexity

Incentivized

For this specific product. It's pretty well suited for management of access points for not a huge campus, I would say for this specific one that I have. But I mean it can manage up to 5,000 access points. So it's a great product. Less appropriate would probably be really massive for the product that I own. The one, that version of it for what I have, I wouldn't say use it for something that's like this mega corporation, huge ginormous corporation because you need the higher end model of what I have. But in general it fits my needs, it fits what we need. It's the capabilities, but there's faster and better ones that I could have got if I needed it.

Incentivized

• Wireless Access
• Security/Role Management
• Firewalling
• Centralized Management

Incentivized

• Easily manages a large number of APs.
• It can push out settings or a new OS to a large group of APs at once.
• The GUI is very intuitive, and follows the model Cisco has created for many of their products.
• It integrates well with our ISE environment for handling RADIUS requests.

Incentivized

• Documentation on Aruba website is very lacking
• Support is hit-or-miss - they may waste a lot of time before you get to someone who has a solution
• Some configuration items are very non-intuitive

Incentivized

• Room for improvement. We tend to update our firmware as soon as possible. We have hit a lot of various bugs and things that were caught in testing, but we're still pushed out live.
• The sorting and searching of access points in the software could use some work essentially, especially cap sensitive things and things like that can be a little irritating to use.

Incentivized

We have more than 500 APs located in 50 locations. Since the implementation of the new controller, we have not observed any major problems with the operation of the WiFi network. Employees observe an improvement in the availability and operation of the network; in new locations and when modernizing existing ones, we focus primarily on a WiFi network for employees rather than a cable connection.

Incentivized

The performance of the cisco 9800 wireless lan controller is quite good. One of the best features is that the network can keep running even if the cisco 9800 wireless lan controller is turned off. One of the downsides is that updates are a little bit complicated where in some instances you have to rebuild the VM where it's hosted

Incentivized

Great contact to Wireless Innovate Program Team and TAC to solve our problems.

Incentivized

Aruba does quite a good job with GUI configuration, especially with AOS 8 - something that Cisco struggles with (maybe they came up with something new now). Aruba can also easily scale. While not on the same level, Ubiquiti has a good GUI but is lacking a good standard controller - users have to stand their own.

Incentivized

In old Cisco-fashion, the product is very reliable, and once setup just works. While it might not have all the bells and whistles in the WebUI, like other products may have, you have complete freedom of configuration on the CLI. Overall a great improvement from older generation WLAN controllers, and all in all a well suited successor

Incentivized

• Good return on investment in terms of a working wireless network for thousands of users
• However, troubleshooting and support may be difficult
• Good integration with ClearPass

Incentivized

• We did replace several WLCs in our site with a redundant [Cisco Catalyst 9800-L Wireless Controller] and saved the cost
• [Cisco Catalyst 9800-L Wireless Controller] with IOS-XE enable us to manage APs in our branches easily, easier than AireOS
• ISSU enable us to do firmware upgrade with minimum downtime, a site with 24/7 activity will not be interrupted anymore

Incentivized