Aruba Wireless Reviews

We are using this solution to provide office internet for our clients.

The functionality is very high and we can properly meet the clients' requirements.

When we connect to Wi-Fi devices it could be easier because sometimes, it takes a lot of time to complete.

It is not as easy as some other products to configure, including setting policies.

Otherwise, everything is fine.

I have been working with Aruba Wireless for the past four years.

I have not found any bugs or glitches in this product.

We have more than 100 users.

Technical support is alright.

The initial setup is okay. It is straightforward and we have no issues with it.

The price of Aruba Wireless should be cheaper.

For the most part, there is nothing that needs to be added and I can recommend this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We are a solution provider and Aruba Wireless is one of the network products that we implement for our customers. We offer it to our clients to provide wireless and cloud services.

Better integration with equipment from other vendors would ease the deployment process in some cases. It is also helpful because certain vendors concentrate more heavily on a certain side of the industry. For example, one may focus on security but neglect availability. Being able to integrate gives a better overall solution.

Security is something that can be improved.

I have been working with Aruba Wireless for about two years. The company has more than 10 years of experience.

Aruba Wireless is stable and we plan to continue using it in the future.

This is a scalable solution.

The technical support is good, although it sometimes depends on who it is that handles the case. 

We deal with several wireless networking products from Aruba, Ruckus, and Brocade.

Sometimes, the initial setup is complex. For example, if I need to integrate with other vendors then there can be issues and we have to do a lot of work to solve these kinds of problems.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the size and density of the network. There are a lot of parameters that dictate how much time it takes, but the average for us is a three to four-day deployment.

We have a design team and a technical team who take care of the implementation and deployment. Most of the time, they consult with me if there's an issue with the design or they need more details. We provide a consulting service for this.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Aruba Wireless concerns the design stage. I suggest trying to design everything using a single vendor. Do not use a multivendor approach because you will have issues with integrating systems together.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight 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.  

I am a system integrator and Aruba Wireless is one of the network infrastructure products that I have experience with. We have customers using versions all the way from AP-100 to AP-535.

We have these devices in many industries, with a focus on educational institutions.

The most valuable feature is the client match. This feature continually monitors the client and provides automatic load-balancing, as well as other advanced features.

Improvements to the GUI, such as being able to search in the Mobility Master, would be nice. It is hard to find and provision APs when you have a substantial install base.

I have been using Aruba Wireless since 2007.

The stability has been great.

We haven't had any trouble with scalability. 75% of our clients are using Aruba Wireless.

I have a lot of experience with wireless networking products from Aruba and Juniper. I also have some experience with Ruckus.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and the deployment is quick. With our experience, it is pretty easy to do.

We integrate Aruba Wireless and other devices for our customers.

My advice for anybody who is considering Aruba Wireless is to try it. If you try it then you're going to like it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use Aruba Wireless strictly for corporate use. Within our company, there are slightly over 100 people using this solution.

I really like the user interface.

Better integration between the controller and the ClearPass portal would be a nice change. Currently, they're separated, but if they could be combined and managed in one portal it would be much better.

I have been using Aruba Wireless for three years.

We have been experiencing some scalability and stability issues on our Apple devices.

There are a lot of competing solutions on the market. I think Aruba should lower their prices.

Aruba Wireless is a very good solution. Should you choose this solution, be sure to start from the beginning and learn as much as you can. This way, you will have a better understanding of its uses — how to navigate and use it properly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. I can't give it a higher rating because of the issues we have experience with our Macintosh devices.

Using this solution district-wide in all of our secondary buildings. We have over 1000 IAP-225 APs deployed, along with ClearPass.

We currently use the MAC address caching through ClearPass to allow guests to connect from a prior authenticated attempt. We also use the Visual RF component in AirWave for tracking devices.

There aren't a lot of features that Aruba has that their competitors don't. With that being said, some of the implementations or features do work as advertised: easy deployment of APs, MAC caching, and aesthetically pleasing GUI for configuration.

The urgent areas of improvement would be customer support, better tuned default settings, and documentation. Aruba’s TAC support for us has been frustrating most of the time, as there is a clear language/dialect barrier when speaking or emailing a TAC representative. We’ve found that we have more emails (which equates to longer resolution time) than typically needed to cover certain questions and updates – as the TAC directions and instructions were either incomplete or we couldn’t understand what they were referencing. There have been occasions where a local Aruba rep, has had to step in for the TAC due to this problem.

Out of the box the Aruba gear (at least with the IAP-225 APs) comes with all of the marketing promised higher throughput settings (which causes issues such as CCI) enabled such as (but not limited to): 80 Mhz channel width (which anybody rarely uses), all 2.4 Ghz channels enabled, and high transmit power turned on. Many of these settings are used rarely in most deployments, and will need to be tuned. Aruba should enable 40 Mhz channels, only enable channels 1,6,11 on 2.4 Ghz, and set the power lower – as this will give most deployments a better chance at succeeding. This would benefit those who just put them in and call it a day or have little to no knowledge on the inner-workings of RF. This isn't an Aruba only problem, many of the wireless vendors do this, and the community has asked for this to change – however, I felt it was worth noting.

Aruba’s documentation is pretty good, however there are cases where something is recommended by a TAC or an Aruba engineer that cannot be found in their documentation for the product itself, or their best practices guides (often referred to as Validated Reference Designs – VRD). The things that we've had to change/rethink but weren't in the documentation are: cluster sizes, standard L2 VLAN, disabling L3 Mobility, and client match.

Four to six years.

We have encountered stability issues. The APs would sometimes randomly reboot; no idea what was causing it and support was less than helpful. The clients connecting would have a magnitude of issues until we turned off or disabled some features (some of which we really wanted to use).

We have encountered scalability issues. We were initially hooked by the simplistic nature of the "controller-less" idea. We have come to find out that we need to revamp our networking from 1-2 clusters per building (depending on size), to one cluster per network closet. This is not in the official documentation, so it feels like bait and switch. We also need to redo our VLANS, as now we've been told to go to one big L2 network for data, again not located in the documentation.

Customer Service:

Customer service is very poor. We've had many problems with Aruba TAC, such as (and not limited to): not being able to understand them, them not being complete in their requests, and outright incompetence. We've had to bring in Aruba reps and other third parties locally to assist in getting issues resolved.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very poor; see Customer Service section.

We previously used Extreme Networks. We switched from 802.11n to 802.11ac, and Aruba was rewarded the bid mainly due to cost.

The setup for the APs is straightforward; however, you need to be extremely knowledgeable to set up ClearPass.

Implementation was done by a little bit of both an in-house team and a vendor team. The vendor helped us get the ClearPass set up; otherwise, we set up the AirWave appliance (monitoring solution - similar to a controller).

Not sure about ROI, but with the money spent attempting to fix the problems caused by this solution, it's definitely not as good as we would like.

In regards to perhaps a 'hidden' ROI, one of our building's WiFi was extremely unreliable that the staff and users of the network simply gave up using it. We are pursuing a different vendor at this location.

Get multiple bids/quotes, and talk to the representatives about the limitations of the product; pretty standard.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Cisco, Extreme Networks (Enterasys at the time), and Xirrus. This process was completed before I came aboard.

Honestly, and simply put, I would look elsewhere. I feel this company falls short on its promises, has been a pain to work with, and the product I feel is inferior to its many competitors.

Don't be fooled by the marketing hype; it's a fair product but it's not everything they promise.

We are using different versions depending on the customer. We have about 400 or 500 customers. Some of them are Aruba, some of them have other technologies. Different versions are deployed all over. We use it as a wireless device manager where appropriate.  

There are only so many features in Wireless controllers. The fact that Aruba has a virtual controller onboard the internet access points makes it cheaper than to buy Aruba Central licenses or Meraki Cloud licenses. That probably makes it most valuable.  

Aruba Wireless is among the leaders in the market. We are not talking about basic access points. As a leader, they keep ahead of the field.  

We have been using it for a year-and-a-half.  

The stability is very good.  

It is very scalable.  

The technical support is good. My impression is that pre-sale support is very good with Aruba. Their global presence is important. I do not have to deal with any other technical support because they have a follow-the-sun type of system that uses different support teams. When I ask for support, we get it and we get it during regular business hours. I never phoned anywhere else but the North American team. They are good and responsive.  

Installation is pretty straight forward.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Aruba wireless eight-out-of-ten. Nobody would get a ten.