Aruba ClearPass is network access control (NAC) technology from HPE company Aruba Networks. Aruba acquired Avenda and its eTips NAC in 2011.
N/A
pfSense
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
We have quite a few visitors to our campus and we don't want to have a set PSK for the wireless so we have configured a guest network where visitors can create an account and gain access to the internet and we don't have to "manage" it since the accounts will expire after a certain time. We have RF scanners in our warehouses and we want them to be allowed on the network and be put into its own VLAN. ClearPass can do this flawlessly by keying off of the MAC address when it comes online and putting it into the correct VLAN. This makes it so we don't have to add each device individually to the system. The only time ClearPass would not be appropriate is in a small deployment where the cost to value wouldn't make sense.
Because pfSense is built around open source software, it is very convenient to be able to deploy in the event of hardware failure. We once had a client with a proprietary router that failed. While the router was under warranty, the expected time for the new router to arrive was about 2 weeks. We decided to implement pfSense for the client as a stop gap and ultimately ended up deploying the full enterprise appliance. Being able to get up and running using commodity hardware was a huge win for the client. We've also had a great amount of success deploying pfSense hardware at apartment complexes. The DNS resolver works great and we've had no issues handling multiple VLANs with various DHCP scopes on it. Finally, we've had clients that require having a failover cluster. Utilizing the built in CARP capabilities, we've been able to provide a very robust failover system that requires little maintenance and no downtime in the event of equipment failure.
Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
Aruba Clearpass is straight forward in terms of day to day use for monitoring and basic user connectivity issues. The system is very robust on the back end, therefore some larger configuration changes may not be the most intuitive. System upgrades and license management are not the most intuitive either.
We had some issues with ClearPass integration with AirGroup on Aruba Controller Clusters. Basically, it was tough to get coordinated between the controller support and the ClearPass support.
From my experience, ClearPass has been the best NAC server of all I've seen. Even though configuration is somewhat hard and it's hard to get training, once you learn how to configure it it works very well. The policies are very granular and scalable and the interface is a well-done web GUI that does not need any extra plugins installed, as some of Cisco's product require. There are many more options than with FortiNAC, and many more integration options. Also, troubleshooting and logging is good.
While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load balancing and connection proxies on the same device as the firewall offers extremely easy configuration and day to day management of network services
Using pfSense has allowed us to build a professional network in our small office without needing a lot of proprietary hardware, saving thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure investment.
The cost for using pfSense is free, so it's a great option for those who don't have a large IT budget
pfSense utilizes all of the industry standard services to provide all of it's functionality, so support for service-level issues is readily available
Because of how much work has been put into pfSense to make it rock solid and reliable, we're able to support our network with minimal IT staffing, saving us thousands of dollars/year in personnel alone.
