The Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.
for well suited, with all these big organizations you can have regional or distributed controller base. I think this is better and then you can consolidate things. All this whole infrastructure to the single locations. Not be a good fit? If you have a small organizations then yeah, maybe some other traditional physical controller.
I love the equipment for small-scale commercial solutions and quality without the price tag. I might not recommend their products for a large organization with multiple locations and servers. However, the GUI interface will allow remote access and setup across the network. I think this is a great solution for small businesses and families or home office solutions, provided there is some IT knowledge for setup and maintenance.
I guess it's very good at managing large scale deployments because I can change configuration on basically all of our devices at once if I want to. It gives us a quick and easy overview of all of the clients, all of the healthy status of our devices.
It's very good at troubleshooting because it pulls logs from a hardware level, whereas otherwise we'd have to log into each device ourselves and get those logs. It does that automatically.
If possible, please add a column for WAP Name and WAP Model within the 2.4/5/6 GHz radio sections, as we have different models of WAPs in the fleet, and it would be easier to identify WAPs within a building.
We conduct digital exams for our students. If there is a way to identify clients and block traffic for applications like ChatGPT, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, there is no filter for ChatGPT or generative AI.
Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution
High availability options are very good. You have multiple options so you can select whichever suits you well. Also you can mix it up if you have more controllers so your downtime risk decreases sharply. Users will not feel any connection issues thanks to powerful and flexible high availability options that Cisco provides.
While it works well in general, there are some bugs in both the GUI and functionality. It has caused spikes of downtime in our network. The HA also is quite cumbersome and specific to set up, while not having the most reliable working around.
We have not needed to contact support, except to replace one device that was damaged in shipping. The company immediately issued an RMA without delay, and we had our replacement product within a week
Not much yet. In my experience from becoming a network engineer four-ish years ago to now, like I said, I used that 5520, which was a Cisco product. These 9800 are a lot smaller and tinier and they seem to do a lot more that the other ones couldn't do. It's a good product.
Prior to this, we used Cisco Meraki wireless access points, which did not allow for centralized control, therefore several access points shared the same SSID. Because the client's movement from one device to another was not as seamless and reliable as it is with the current Ubiquiti solution, this shift cost both time and stability during configuration.
I think that it has had a positive impact, especially with the dashboard being a university. The 9800 dashboard gives us one spot where we can go to see how many clients are on each of our SSIDs or perhaps client utilization. We've dashboard may be saying, Hey, you have one building that has 90 people connected to one access point. So that gives us the information we need to go in and expand that coverage or add in some high density to address those issues.
