The Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller is a highly scalable, service-rich, resilient, and flexible platform. It provides centralized control, management, and troubleshooting for high-scale deployments in service provide, enterprise, and large campus deployments.
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Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points
Score 9.4 out of 10
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The Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points includes the 9115 and 9117, and designed to meet high demand network access.
In testing, Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points outperformed all other APs in our testing. Performance was second to none in the testing lineup. Reliability has been proven over the many years we have used this product. The new 9100s have also not presented any hardware …
[Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller's] software quality has been shed in recent years. The only problem I have with it is its inability to work with older Cisco Access Points. However, that's to be expected for any deployment. While the controller's UI works well, some areas could be improved. API integrations lack flexibility. [I feel] it's time for policy redesign. It can be a little difficult to determine coding quality.
Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points are well suited for most applications as they scale very well and can be configured to work in a lot of different scenarios. However they are quite costly so they may not be suited for all business purposes. But they do perform and deliver and rarely cause issues.
The GUI on the Cisco 8540 WLC is much better designed than other Cisco products. Its easy to navigate between the different settings to find what is needed.
The AP groups allows touching multiple APs at one time.
It also allows us to create standard SSIDs that can be used at all sites that connect back to it, this saves a lot of time instead of hitting each site with a local controller.
Code quality is a bit hit and miss. This will be great for a while, then things will be bad for a while, then we'll do it again. The UI of the controller works, but could do with a refresh, and I would like to see some improvement on layout and organization.
The constant code/firmware upgrades and the QA of new code could be better.
Maybe the compatibility with old Cisco Access Points could be improved, but it's normal in all kinds of deployments.
The Cisco Catalyst 9120 Access Points have been a solid deployment for me. Using their interface is a mix of new and old. They run IOS, so if you know the CLI, you can easily navigate around them. You can join them to an older controller if it supports a certain version, you can join it to a new 9800 controller--very straight forward--and you can run the embedded wireless controller on them directly. I've found this to be very useful at smaller sites. The Cisco Catalyst 9120 Access Points are not limited to feature sets like the older generations' mobility express platform.
Cisco is providing the best in class access points. We would be focusing Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points to have the common platform. We are waiting for cloud implementation on DNA or cloud monitoring of 9800cl in Meraki dashboard. It's reliable, tagging gives a lot of flexibility. Virtualization finally works as expected.
Cisco has been very good at correcting early issues with their code. Their TAC support has been fantastic when I would open a case with issues I was facing. Even though the hardware was new, they were very familiar with the interfaces and issues I was having. In the past I've been concerned about adopting a new product right away because of support issues. That was not the case here. Once I had the deployment up and running, they have had a good run of reliability.
We have [done] some work before with the Cisco 3504 product, but the more recent Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller provides a wider range of capabilities for managing the wireless network and each individual device [and] also being able to handle more users. Unfortunately, we didn't test and deploy equivalent products from other concurrent companies.
In testing, Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points outperformed all other APs in our testing. Performance was second to none in the testing lineup. Reliability has been proven over the many years we have used this product. The new 9100s have also not presented any hardware reliability issues for us so far. Some of the other vendors offer some nice to have features such as Bluetooth device diagnostics and very deep AI assurance.
These access points offer flexibility in deployment scenarios, supporting both standalone and controller-based architectures. Organisations can choose the model that best suits their current needs and scale as their requirements grow. Cisco Aironet Access Points are compatible with Cisco's Wireless LAN controllers, allowing for centralized management and monitoring of a large number of access points across the network. With the recent changes, it will even support cloud base controllers.
The Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller allows you to reduce your hardware footprint of wireless controllers deployed in your environment. Instead of having a controller per site deployed, you can have a couple of 8540 controllers in your data center that can handle up 6000 Access Points.
Some of the savings on hardware cost is offset by the cost of redundant WAN circuits. The access points will continue to function when connectivity to the Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller is unreachable, but it will not allow any new connections in that wireless environment.
