Aruba Wireless Reviews

Aruba Wireless does not have too many distinguishing feature sets. However, tunneling is more flexible in this solution than other solutions, such as Ruckus.

Aruba Wireless could improve the dashboard. It is not straightforward or intuitive to use and could be more user-friendly. For IT employees the dashboards are fine but when it comes to the end-user it is difficult. The Mobility Controller dashboard is not meant for non-IT employees.

I have been using Aruba Wireless for approximately 12 years.

Aruba Wireless is a stable solution. The controllers have been working well for over four years, but I have replaced a few APs.

I rate the stability of Aruba Wireless an eight out of ten.

Aruba Wireless is scalable. However, you need to purchase certain models of the solution to have high limits. For example, the 7210 model has hard-coded limits that I cannot increase.

We primarily support hotels and I have completed 500 rooms. The system can handle approximately 500 to 1000 users.

When we need to escalate to a priority one case it is difficult.

I rate the support of Aruba Wireless a two out of five.

Neutral

I have used Ruckus previously and when I compare this solution to Ruckus, they are both very similar. I implement both of them.

The initial setup of Aruba Wireless is a lot easier to do than on other solutions.

The price of Aruba Wireless could improve. It is expensive. However, I am able to reduce my costs because I do not use all the features in the controller, such as the AD integration and other enterprise features.

I prefer Ruckus over Aruba Wireless.

I rate Aruba Wireless an eight out of ten.

We using now working with a customer in Jedda. We sold more than 738 access points - 294 outdoor access points and around 500 indoor ones. We sold a controller for this number as well.

Aruba has a lot of features. 

The stability is the best. It's very reliable. 

The roaming signal is excellent. 

You can do firewalling over the WiFi which is unique.

The initial setup is easy.

Sometimes the configuration is difficult. 

Aruba needs to offer an IT telephone in order to can catch all of the market. Cisco already has an IT telephone security product. Aruba does not. If Aruba offered an IP conference option it would be great.

I've worked with Aruba for seven years at this point. 

The stability is great, as is the reliability and the performance. there are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. the signal is strong. 

Aruba is scalable. Many products are. For example, if we have a controller, we can manage 2,000 access points and can add another thousand access points.

Technical support is very good, very qualified. We are very happy with their level of knowledge and support.

We are a partner for Aruba, Cisco, and Huawei.

The implementation is easy. Anyone that has a platform from Aruba or knows about Aruba knows about configuring the product, which can be difficult. There are many deployment options for a natural configuration. You need to figure out what type of deployment you are doing (and there can be many) and do it according to your specific needs. If one has enough experience or is certified from Aruba, he can do it. If he doesn't it's complex and difficult. 

ClearPass from Aruba is complicated. However, it's a very good, powerful software.

We are on a partner, gold partner at tier-one for HP. We are working directly with the vendor. There isn't any team, or any supplier, or anyone between us and Aruba. For Cisco, we are working with their team or, and the suppliers from Europe, from Dubai. We request some material from them, and that's all. Huawei has the same setup as Cisco.

I'm certified ACMP, ACSP, ACDB, and a certified ACAD, AC professional.

While the latest release was 10, we are working with 8.7.

New users will get a lot of benefits from Aruba. They have a lot of products - including ClearPass. Users will not find any net solution like ClearPass, from anyone. In Gartner, it is a leader in IoT for wired and wireless IoT such as cameras, access control, et cetera. They also have great switches. It's a very big vendor like HP. 

Aruba has a lifetime warranty. You don't need to get proactive care; the hardware already has a lifetime warranty. In the end, you will get a lot of benefits. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I was able to provide Aruba Wireless to financial, Telco, and hospitality industries.

If you're looking into a wireless solution, more and more people now are using Aruba Wireless. There are two key reasons why: in a developing country, many of the companies look at the cost and quality of a solution. Cost-wise, Aruba Wireless is very attractive here in the Sri Lankan market. The other key reason is Aruba Wireless provides their key product portal and a limited lifetime warranty. Other providers do not provide that level of warranty. These are the reasons why a customer would choose to purchase Aruba products than Cisco, or any other access point or wireless solution.

The key feature of this solution is the value for money. If customers can get a good quality product at a very competitive price, plus a limited lifetime warranty, then this gives very high value to the customer, which is what you can get from Aruba Wireless.

Aruba Wireless is able to provide value addition, apart from their product features.

This solution is user-friendly and their technical support team provides very good support.

An area for improvement I found in this solution is the configuration. Though it's currently an improved version, it could still be made easier, so technical people could benefit from being able to configure Aruba Wireless within a quicker amount of time.

I'm a specialist and I've been in this industry for 22 years, and I've been dealing with Aruba Wireless for over 10 years. I've worked with it within the last 12 months.

Aruba Wireless is a stable product.

Aruba Wireless is scalable. We have different product segments and we educate different customer requirements and industries. Because of COVID, all industries are facing a lot of challenges, but we find this product scalable.

We have our pre-sales team with us in-house, but we do have two technical support people distributed here locally. We always communicate with them. They share their product knowledge, experiences, and user case studies, to help us improve. We also share our experiences with them to also help them improve. On a scale of one to five, I'm giving the technical support team a four. They provide very good product support.

The initial setup of Aruba Wireless is not complicated. In the past, it was complicated, e.g. We needed experienced technical people to do the configuration and the initial setup. Nowadays, even basic technical people can do it.

It has improved, but what we are expecting is that when new technologies arise, along with the new technologies, the configuration should be simplified.

The cost for Aruba Wireless is good. It's attractive.

I evaluated Cisco Wireless.

Our company's role is system integrator. We are involved with products and solutions which we provide to the end customers. The products we provide vary, because it would depend on the requirement and customer requirement levels. It would also depend on the current pricing of the products, e.g. this is because we provide different vendor products, not just Aruba. We also provide Cisco, Maracas, and the entire product spectrum that we provide to the customers.

We provide the latest version of this product to our customers, because with the latest version, the benefit to the customers is that they can get the maximum usage of the product lifetime.

Other than the product features, our customers value our onsite support, onsite feedback, clarifications, and installations. We are able to quickly sort out the issues experienced by our customers.

For people who are not currently using Aruba Wireless, I would tell them to look into the Aruba product range and try it out for themselves. They'll find out that these are Amazing products with very good product support.

I'm rating Aruba Wireless an eight out ten, because no products could reach the perfect score of ten. Technology is fast-changing, so today's technology won't be tomorrow's technology. There's no technological vendor who could be ranked a ten, so my rating for this product is an eight.

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 primarily use the solution for access points. 

The solution is very complete. 

The portal has been very helpful for us. 

It's easy to set up the solution. 

We have found the product to be stable. 

It's scalable. 

They need to increase the number of routers on the controller. The VSSIP needs to have at least 25 access points. I just need them to increase the access points without the controller.

Other than that, it has everything we need, and we do not need any new features. 

The downside is right now there is a shortage of hardware. It's hard to acquire switches and access points. 

I started using the solution one year ago.

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have ten people using the solution right now. 

I've never called technical support. I haven't needed any assistance so far. 

I've also used Juniper.

The product has been very easy to set up. It's straightforward to implement. It did not become overly complex. Under ten access points only takes about five minutes to set up. 

We only need one person to manage the solution. 

It is free to use. It is open source. We do not have to pay for a license. 

We're an Aruba partner. 

We are using version 11. In 2022, it might be now version 12. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Aruba is part our our network infrastructure.

The most valuable features are ease of use, a simple management interface, cost-effectiveness, reliability, and simple installation.

The web-based GUI is much simpler to use than similar products by Cisco.

Because it's cloud-based, it takes time for the floor maps and the heat map to load. I understand the reason for this but it would be nice if once you click on the flop map, instead of waiting sometimes 20 or 30 seconds, it would come up a lot quicker.

I have been working with the Aruba Wireless cloud service for between a year and eighteen months. It's fairly new but I work on it every day.

This is the most stable wireless product that we have had.

We have only had similar products by Cisco but we've had a lot of problems with them. Our partners have come out to look at them, as well as remote services, and they've told us that "everything is fine". However, we have to reboot APs here and there at all of our sites.

Once we implemented the Aruba solution, we've not had those problems since.

We have nine remote sites right now, around the world, with multiple access points per site. Some sites have two or three access points, whereas others have between 25 and 30, depending on how large the site is. In total, we have 147 access points.

We have a data network that we use, and we also have a guest network. ADF authentication logs into the data network and the guest network is open. It's pretty simple to scale.

We had a building and a site that we decommissioned, so we have between nine and eleven spare APs floating around. All you have to do is plug them into the network using the right port, give them a name, and they come online. After that, you assign a foundation license to them and overall, it couldn't be simpler.

With the spares and backups we have, should we need to scale, and we always do, it's easy.

The technical support is good. They know what they're doing although the biggest problem that I have with them is their accents.

You open up a ticket and I have nothing against the people, but it always routes to India. We open a support case and they're very difficult to understand. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. As such, we've had some problems communicating and we've had to use text messages to compensate for the accents.

Otherwise, their technical skills are top-notch.

Another thing that I'll say about their tech support is that it's easy to get in and have a ticket assigned, which gets the ball rolling when we have a problem. With Cisco, it sometimes took days to get an engineer assigned.

I also have experience with Cisco wireless LAN controllers and a little bit with the Meraki line of networking equipment.

We were primarily running Cisco products at one time. However, we pulled out the Cisco devices because they were too complicated and too expensive.

We bought out another company that is currently using Aruba wireless LAN controllers. However, we're getting rid of that system and moving them to the cloud.

The reliability of Aruba products is better and the technical support from Aruba is more responsive.

Cisco is good but there's much better competition out there.

The initial setup is very easy.

Once the cloud is set up, you assign each AP a license through the web portal. You plug it in, make sure it's in a port that's configured for our Wi-Fi network, and it works. It's a three or four-step process and it's very simple to do.

Maintenance, such as deploying updates, can be done using a single person. I do all of it for our company and we have 147 access points, worldwide.

Doing an upgrade involves two clicks, and it can be done within 15 minutes.

This can be compared to Cisco, where you had to pre-stage everything. It was painful and it took me four hours to complete.

This is by far the best investment that we've made in a long time.

Aruba Wireless is much cheaper than our previous solution by Cisco. It is a significant saving, measured in thousands of dollars per year.

We looked at Fortinet, Aruba, and several other vendors. Ultimately, we found that Aruba was by far the best.

We authenticate through Aruba ClearPass, which is the TACACS server that we use.

This is a product that I recommend and especially if you're with Cisco, I suggest switching. Cisco just makes things complex. They are simplifying things with Meraki, which is something that I understand because I've been in the IT industry for a long time. With the company scaling back, I'm doing the job of three or four people and with this in mind, it's important to go with simplicity. Cisco, for some odd reason, just cannot keep it simple. It has to be complicated, even when it comes to their documentation.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The feature I found most valuable to customers in Aruba Wireless is not a technical feature. It's more of its image, trademark, or brand as the product is very well-known in the market, and that's a good point to offer to customers.

My customers just ask about the basic features of the product, and usually, when asking about Aruba products, customers don't pay too much attention to any specific feature as long as the product is solid and sure, and that you can change or modify it, as what you can get from Aruba Wireless.

One area for improvement in Aruba Wireless is its dashboard or interface because in some cases, it's not as easy to use as it should be, but overall, it's okay.

Pricing for the product is also on the higher side.

Another area for improvement in Aruba Wireless is technical support because it's hard to reach when issues arise and the speed of answer could be faster.

Other areas for improvement in the product include integration and configuration.

We've used Aruba Wireless within the last twelve months for some of our customers. We act as sellers and integrators of Aruba Wireless. We don't use the product, but our customers use it if needed and if it is a requisite for our customers. We've been dealing with Aruba Wireless for two years now.

Aruba Wireless is a stable product. I didn't notice any problems with its stability.

Aruba Wireless, in terms of scalability, is okay.

The technical support for Aruba Wireless needs improvement in terms of providing better support and being more reachable when problems appear. Support also needs to improve its speed in answering customer issues.

In terms of setting up Aruba Wireless, if everything goes well, usually there's no problem, but sometimes if you need something specific, it becomes very tricky, particularly in terms of finding the right support for your setup issue. It's not easy. As for how long the deployment of Aruba Wireless takes, it didn't take too much time, though I can't give an exact timeframe.

In terms of pricing, the pricing for Aruba Wireless is not bad for large-sized companies, but for medium-sized companies, it's on the higher end, but because Aruba has a good company image, medium-sized companies still go with Aruba Wireless.

My advice to others looking into using Aruba Wireless for business is that Aruba is a well-known brand. When you buy the product, you should know what you're purchasing. As long as you have all the information you need before the purchase, you have complete knowledge of Aruba Wireless, and you know what to expect from the product and what to do with the product, then go for it.

I would rate Aruba Wireless eight out of ten, overall. I only give a rating of ten when everything goes okay, and that's almost impossible. There could be room for improvement in the pricing, and in any business relationship, there's always an issue that could arise, so it's very rare for me to give a ten out of ten to any product or company.

My company has a business relationship with Aruba Wireless as an integrator.

We primarily use the solution for wireless access, for using WiFi and the network, the internet.

It's very popular. We've ordered more than 150 units.

It's a really good product. It's really easy to maintain. 

The AP preconfig with the USB console cable and everything is easy and really useful for the company. 

The installation is simple. 

Users have been very pleased with the solution as it offers such a high-speed connection. The network strength is good. 

It is more intuitive and user-friendly.

I don't have any access in the Aruba dashboard. I need more access. I only install the hardware and the software part for the client. However, there are no admin privileges, which is an issue. You need to contact them and make a special request. They should allow everybody to fiddle with their settings if they bought the solution.

I've used the solution for the past six months. 

We haven't had any performance issues. The solution is stable. 

The scalability is pretty good. You can expand it by using Aruba Switches. 

We have about 700 users on the solution at this point. 

I've never had any reason to reach out to technical support.

I previously used Meraki. Aruba has better network speed. Also, in Meraki, when we make changes, we need to refresh the dashboard. With Aruba, it's one click and we can regulate and refresh the dashboard. It's much easier. 

The solution is simple to install. It's not overly difficult or complex. For half of the preconfig process, it might only take 15 minutes. 

Then, there might be one and a half hours for testing, to fix the access IDs and other access points to match everything in the data center. 

We only need two people to install and set up the solution. 

I deploy the solution for our clients. 

We have seen a positive ROI.

I don't handle the licensing aspect of the solution. It is likely more expensive than Meraki since Meraki just has a dashboard. Aruba has a little bit more on offer. 

You do have to purchase the software and hardware separately.

We did not consider any other options before choosing Aruba.

We have a partnership with Aruba.

Overall, it's a good solution, and we are happy with it. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.