AeroHive - Your thoughts?

[Darylrese]

Hi Guys,

 

We have a meeting with AeroHive this afternoon to look at their wireless products, which seem almost too good to be true! About 4 years ago we invested in Aruba and need to keep that solution going but add to it. AeroHive seems to fit the bill perfectly. No controller and you can AD-Hoc the AP's as you need them. Simply plug into a POE switch and with minimal configuration, away you go! This is what we are lead to believe anyway...

 

Anyone using AeroHive? If so what do you think about it? Anything to look out for?

 

I believe their AP's also host airplay services which is extremely handy as our school are buying more and more ipads this year, anyone comment on if this feature works well?

Edited April 24, 2013 by Darylrese

[RTFM]

I think AeroHive has bonjour bridging currently, I know Ruckus are releasing this shortly too

[apeman]

We were also sold on there sale pitch as well, but also tested alot of kit before we went with Aerohive. (Not my choice)

 

But there are many many bugs in the firmwares

If you have anything over a basic Layer 2 Lan you will have issues, Captive Web portal rarely works, AP's reboot, GRE tunnels don't work, Bonjour crashes AP's.

UK support dont even know there own product, we phoned them asking how to install a SSL cert signed by Comodo for the Captive Web Portal they didnt know how and asked why we wanted to use SSL they also tried to tell us we couldnt have the same Captive Web Portal with the same SSL cert for 2.4GHz and 5GHz, i proved them wrong We have also had to change our Lan/VLan setup 4 times because of bad advice from support.

 

I must say Aerohive aren't the only wireless vendor with issues and you will just have to try demo kit and see if it fits your needs.

[bossman]

Only just implemented our Aerohive system throughout the school and to be totally honest it has performed better then we could have hoped, we did have a captive portal configured and it worked really well except that you had to keep the page open and browse on other tabs which was not a problem but having sorted another re-config through our Smoothwall box (courtesy of Jay) we have a very good working wireless environment for our first set of 30 IPads which have worked flawlessly when they have been used.

 

We also have Samsung android devices which are working equally as well plus our own HP100e netbooks which are built onto the network.

 

We are looking into VLans but for the moment everything is working as it should be, as I have stated it is a project ongoing so will keep updating as we come across any problems and how we overcome them.

 

Excellent service from a company called LAN3 and the contact is Adam Slocombe, only took 2 days to install and configure, I realise it is new and only been running for the 2nd week so I do expect little niggles until we get it right for us but the service from LAN3 is good and after service seems friendly also (only contacted them once for a trivial ask) but they were excellent.

 

It was a toss up between Aerohive and Meraki but I am pleased with the cost to the school which has been small compared to what other wireless solutions wanted to charge.

 

Listen to what they have to say and give it a try as they will give you trial APs to work with.

 

Good luck in your choice

[Darylrese]

Thanks guys, LAN3 is who we have been dealing with too. Not the same chap though.

 

We are now just waiting for a demo kit to arrive so that we can have a play and see what we think! The webinar we had made the product seem very easy to use, however the LAN3 network engineer who came down dived straight into some really advanced stuff it can do and confused me a little haha

 

From what I understand of it, plug it into a gigabit port on a POe switch, assign profiles and VLANs and away you go....we shall see! We have a fibre backbone between cabs with 10/100 switches so might have to look at installing new switches too if we go with it :/

[wesleyw]

We are migrating our aging Aruba wireless over to Aerohive at the minute started with 15 APs to cover the Sixth Form Block and Science Block worked well until about a week in where the APs randomly reset themselves to 1/1/1970 quick fix to sort it out and they haven't had an issue since, we use the cloud hosted solution to hold our configuration. We've added a further 7 APs since to our Humanities block and they are working fine as well. Very simple to setup and use but you can configure them to do practically anything which is of course where it gets complicated

 

 

Wes

[Darylrese]

Great thank-you. This is exactly what we intend on doing apart from we need to keep Aruba going and run AeroHive along side it in areas Aruba doesn't cover.

 

Does anyone know a rough cost of an access point? LAN3 wouldn't tell us until a quote arrives!

[SYNACK]

Best advice is to see how well it works on your environment. Personally I questioned their value when their whole sales pitch and engineering effort seemed to be on iCack. It all depends on how well it suites your specific site and set of equipment.

[Darylrese]

Unfortunatly iCack is exactly what our school wants dispite all the advice in the world to go against it!

[ConradJones]

Only just implemented our Aerohive system throughout the school and to be totally honest it has performed better then we could have hoped, we did have a captive portal configured and it worked really well except that you had to keep the page open and browse on other tabs which was not a problem but having sorted another re-config through our Smoothwall box (courtesy of Jay) we have a very good working wireless environment for our first set of 30 IPads which have worked flawlessly when they have been used.

 

We also have Samsung android devices which are working equally as well plus our own HP100e netbooks which are built onto the network.

 

We are looking into VLans but for the moment everything is working as it should be, as I have stated it is a project ongoing so will keep updating as we come across any problems and how we overcome them.

 

Excellent service from a company called LAN3 and the contact is Adam Slocombe, only took 2 days to install and configure, I realise it is new and only been running for the 2nd week so I do expect little niggles until we get it right for us but the service from LAN3 is good and after service seems friendly also (only contacted them once for a trivial ask) but they were excellent.

 

It was a toss up between Aerohive and Meraki but I am pleased with the cost to the school which has been small compared to what other wireless solutions wanted to charge.

 

Listen to what they have to say and give it a try as they will give you trial APs to work with.

 

Good luck in your choice

 

+1 for LAN3 here too.

[Darylrese]

The only thing with LAN3 is they seem to have a big backlog of jobs so not sure how long turn around will be.

 

Anyone recommend Ruckus? I'm receiving plenty of PM's from various people offering Ruckus as a solution but not seen it before. I'm guessing it needs a controller though.

[Haptic]

As official partners of AirTight Networks you may be interested to hear more regarding their controller-less solution.

 

There's also some interesting articles regarding their patent battle with Aerohive currently.

 

Feel free to PM if you'd like more details

[ConradJones]

Patents are the worse thing about the IT Industry.

[Haptic]

Agreed, that and manufacturer's support hotlines.

[wesleyw]

£400-£500 per AP I think with the usual support of 3 years included?

[garethm]

I've used Aerohive in a couple of deployments, and cannot sing it's praises enough!

 

They work out about £500 per AP if I remember right - and LAN3 did one of the installs, but I did the other myself, and I'm certified.

 

The management is just great, incredibly powerful too. Seriously worth every penny!

[Darylrese]

£500 per AP is bang on what we thought it would be. I just hope the quote that comes back is affordable. We wont be doing anything really fancy, just a couple of SSID's, Bonjour Services for Ipad to use with Airplay Server and attach VLAN's to different SSID's.

[beanie4tx]

I like Aerohive, but my administration is making me get rid of them because of the annual license fees.

 

Good deal for any of you guys who need some cheap AP320 units:

Aerohive AP320 802 11n Enterprise WiFi Access Point 2 4GHz 5GHz Ceiling Mount | eBay

Aerohive AP320 802 11n Enterprise WiFi Access Point 2 4GHz 5GHz Wall Mount | eBay

[petertec]

I don't understand why Aerohive is pitched as controller-less? Hive Manager is surely just a virtual controller - much like lots of other options in the market? Seems like their whole pitch is based on a marketing spin?

[ConradJones]

the hive manager is only required to configure the access point it is not required for the operation so its is a configuration device.

 

the ap's don't talk to the hive manager to authenticate user or any other information.

 

traditional controller based ap's wouldn't function without the controller.

[petertec]

there are other solutions out there that do the same with regards to authentication and that continue to function if the controller goes down. thats why I say I'm not sure why Aerohive focus on it so much? Virtual controllers from other manufacturers aren't exactly pricey anymore either so I'm not sure what the value of Aerohive is? How much is the Hive Manager roughly??