We currently have approximately 70 Xirrus access points across 10 sites. We have a new site we’d like to bring online and I’m constantly hearing good things on this sub about Aruba so I think I’d be remiss to not look into at least. I haven’t floated it with my VAR yet as I’m not quite ready to spend an entire day on the phone but I just wanted to gauge from you guys what you feel are the strengths of weaknesses of your Aruba deployments or any you have been involved in.
What I love about our Xirrus gear is how easy it is and how little time I need to spend on it. It is all cloud managed which I would like to retain with Aruba. All I need to do to add a new access point is add the serial number to our account, add the AP to the appropriate profile and plug it into a switch. All the config gets downloaded straight to the AP and no additional network configuration is needed. Is this the case with Aruba as well?
How does Aruba stack up price wise? From what I can see their individual AP prices are quite good but what other costs are involved such as licensing? Is it a requirement to have an on-prem controller or can it all talk to a cloud controller? Our network is all Cisco so I assume that shouldn’t be an issue but I understand it likes to talk to Aruba switches.
Creating new profiles and SSIDs is a breeze on Xirrus and takes no time at all. We’re using 802.1x for corporate devices authenticated against NPS. Does it need to talk to ClearPass?
Ultimately I’m looking for something as simple as Xirrus but not quite as expensive. Does Aruba fit the bill?
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