Anyone use Aerohive?

[win]

I spoke to them at the Bett show a few days ago and it looks very impressive. There is no WLAN controller as the WAPs are controlled by something in the 'cloud'.

 

They mentioned some type of roaming technology WiFi standard that is compatible with aerohive WAPs, whereas Ruckus uses proprietary technology and has not implemented it yet.

 

Anyone recommend Aerohive?

[mark100]

We have been using them for about 3-4 years now. Can recommend them highly. We have 50 units (120 and 121) to cover our college. Works well for our staff and students for BYOD and supporting our ipads/Laptops. The cloud controller works wells and updated regular with new features.

If your walking around college, the access point your connected to will tell the aps around it to get ready to accept your connection when you move out of it so you virtually have no drop off in signal.

Pm me if you need any info.

[zag]

Yeh i've heard good things about them also.

[Soulfish]

I used them in the last school I worked in. Put in around 100 APs for site-wide coverage. Worked brilliantly and was very competitively priced.

[simpsonj]

Have Aerohive installed here by Lan3, can highly recommend both!

[zag]

Just out of interest how do they authenticate BYOD users? Is it by MAC address?

[win]

If your walking around college, the access point your connected to will tell the aps around it to get ready to accept your connection when you move out of it so you virtually have no drop off in signal.

 

That's exactly what the aerohive guy at bett was telling me. If it works at your college then he was telling the truth, think i will go with AH.

 

Just out of interest how do they authenticate BYOD users? Is it by MAC address?

 

He demo'd the interface and it is possible to assign everyone a unique key, including the guest. This makes it possible to monitor them individually, can't remember if there was another way.

 

I was told it was capable of blocking torrent traffic using DPI. Can anyone confirm if this is true?

Thanks

[Mustang]

We have 110 APs (121 and 330) and had them installed by Lan3 about 2 years ago and are still troubleshooting the problems now.

 

First problem, lazy ass bloke from Lan3 didn't do a proper survey and just guessed where the AP's should go.

Meraki and Aerohive use the exact same hardware, get some trial AP's and open them up have a look.

Hivemanager and HiveOS are buggy and new releases often get pulled and then re-released within a few days to fix the major bugs.

Roaming doesn't work properly, guest access has lots of issues, AP's auto power setting doesn't work, AP's randomly reboot.

 

We do have a very complicated Lan design, we route all the traffic from the edge and this normally confuses a lot of engineering and takes them a while to get there head around it.

I suspect this our Lan design hasn't helped with some of the issues but it really isn't anything unique, we have been working with Lan3 and Aerohive to fix most of the issues and things are much better than when it was installed 2 years ago.

If you do use Lan3 you want Steve Coles doing the install, he's knows his stuff.

 

I advise you test as many manufactures as you can and focus on the wireless capabilities before you get sucked in by all the features. We tested Aerohive, Meraki, Xirrus, Extricom, Aruba and HP, we would have tested Ruckus kit but couldn't get demo equipment.

[bossman]

Yeah we had Lan3 install ours 28 ap's a year ago and we just loved it from day one, not had to touch it since apart from updates to AP's but that is all,

 

First class crowd at LAN3 than you

[nicklowe]

Mustang,

 

Strongly agree that a proper site survey is important and necessary whoever you go with!

 

Meraki and Aerohive do use the same OEM to physically build their APs at the moment, Senao Networks in China and use QCA (Atheros) chips for wireless.

(I suspect that this many change somewhat down the line with Cisco's acquisition of Meraki.)

The boards are built to custom designs and requirements however, so you can't draw too much inference from who manufacturers them.

Software engineering, the main differentiator with all vendors these days, is in house for both companies.

 

I have had good success with HiveOS and HiveManager 6.1r3 that has recently been released. Have you upgraded yet and exercised your use cases?

(We have a network of around 100 HiveAP 330s.)

 

Every vendor has their share of bugs and issues with their products, this is why testing what you want to do as well as you can is so important before purchasing.

 

Nick

Edited February 2, 2014 by nicklowe