So we're trialing a small fleet of 2930f's as our new go-to basic L3 switch. In HPE/Aruba land, they appear to be the cheapest model that supports the full feature set we normally deploy, namely because PVLAN is kept out of the cheaper models.
Anyway, last week I fired up the Aruba central demo, attached 9 switches to it (limit is 10 for 60 days). I was very pleased by first impressions. I had a new level one put the serial numbers and MACs in the portal, applied licenses, and the switches grabbed IPs and auto-joined the cloud controller. Defined local passwords, updated firmware, all very straightforward. Potentially very useful for drop shipping, or a franchise contract we're bidding on.
Next I went to start more advanced configuration: and things went south. We're not talking particularly arcane things here. VSF isn't exactly common, but it's one of the golden selling points of the newer Aruba/procurve switches. I could find no way to deploy VSF, bpdugaurd, configure spanning tree, or a dozen other things. There IS a CLI snippet box to paste fully-formed configuration changes to, but not terribly helpful if you're on a somewhat new CLI (there are definitely some changes compared to the ancient procurves I touched before). No problem, off to the local console/ssh. First strike: the password configured on the cloud wasn't required to SSH in. Then I found the configure context completely bereft of commands. After an hour being bounced between ProCurve and Aruba Central support, I got that the local CLI is disabled by Aruba Central, and that to remove a switch from Aruba Central, you go to subscriptions, deselect the switches you'd like to remove, then click save.
I'm having trouble seeing why you'd want Aruba Central on switches with OSPF, PVLAN, and a number of other capabilities that Aruba Central makes borderline useless. Yes I can send commands to it blind, but I really can't troubleshoot the gritty network engineer stuff without removing it from the portal and getting VPN access to the site.
Am I wrong? Is there more to this product than I think? So far, the 2930fs are fine otherwise. I'm a bit concerned about their noise level, but not sure what to do about it. The problem is the good ole 3560's are so damn quiet. Does anybody make L3 access switches with centrifugal blowers instead of 40mm fans anymore?
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