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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HPE Juniper Access Points
Score 8.8 out of 10
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The Juniper AP Series Access Points work in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud Architecture and Mist AI to collect and analyze metadata in near real-time from all wireless clients. This is to enable rapid problem detection and root cause identification with predictive recommendations and proactive correction realizing the self-driving network.
[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.
The Mist portal-controlled Juniper APs are great in an environment where clients are relatively stationary. Coverage is fantastic, and throughput is really good. I would be more concerned about placing these in a distribution-type warehouse where clients frequently roam between APs. While I've not had any issues, I could see where some APs might become sticky due to the cloud-controlled nature. In my experience, a local controller would be better suited to environments like that. I'm also concerned that support and quality may suffer due to the HPE merger.
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.
Juniper AP45 coverage is great. We have one deployed in a sub-optimal manner (too high, too much space for a single AP), and we still have great coverage.
The APs are easy to configure via the Mist Portal. You can create sitewide templates, as well as templates for subsets of APs.
The APs are reliable. We don't have much trouble out of them. I can count on 1 hand how many times I've had to reboot one in the past year.
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.
Very feature rich, easy enough for beginners to understand layout and initial setup. Need a good training (online, Cisco Leaning Network, etc.) to fully understand all features and product capabilities. Strict power requirements for APs are only major drawback for our specific implementation.
We used a reseller to help set up and initially manage the Juniper APs. Templates are set up and deployed to sites, and at first, it may seem complicated, with a slight learning curve. Once created and deployed, the overall management and usability are great. In summary, the initial setup takes some advanced knowledge of the Cloud Dashboard setup with templates. After that, it's easy to use and manage moving forward.
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.
I prefer Juniper. Configuring the extreme environment was odd and clunky. Three years after we deployed Extreme I got informed the virtual controller we were using was end of life. The APs were still good, just the controller was end of life. I had to deploy a new virtual controller and reconfigure everything. I won't have this problem with Mist's cloud controller
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.
Honestly, the best thing I can say is users had no idea we changed the network. We went from a network with little to no problems to a new network with no problems.
When we deployed the new Access Points, users just connected and went about their day.
