Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Score9 out of 10

205 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Wireless LAN

Jamie Jones View profile

Wireless Consultant in Information Technology at Block Solutions (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

How we use it is to basically provide comprehensive wireless solutions for healthcare organizations. Latest tech, latest features. And bridges into the wider catalyst solution. So basically full stack visibility and management.

Pros

Comprehensive feature set. Basically very versatile in terms of providing solutions to a lot of kind of NHS issues. Every NHS trustee's bespoke, so there's usually a way we can shoehorn some of the features within the platform to service energy.

Cons

If you speak to my management team, ISSU service upgrades being more stable and a slight reduction in the bugs.

Return on Investment

With movement into IOT and integration with Spaces, it's providing a lot more use cases we can leverage for customer needs.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to manage all of our SSIDs and our access points. It gives our users wireless access.

Pros

It’s really great to have a user-friendly interface and manage. It gives you a really good overview of all of your access points, and the quick setup wizard is fantastic for just going through and making quick changes.

Cons

I can't think of any at the moment.

Return on Investment

Positive ROI. I had a self-generated issue three weeks ago, and it resolved itself the moment I fixed the problem that I caused.

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a lot of customers using the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers. This is from very critical environments that need top performing Wi-Fi and many others. Cisco offers an extremely wide catalogue of controllers and is very flexible in configuration, matching every environment. With URWB and wi-fi nowadays, it’s ideal to be able to configure, manage and monitor both from the same platform.

Pros

Config flexibility
Overall view and dashboards
Compatibility

Cons

Making it more easy for new users
More dashboards
Can’t even think of something else

Return on Investment

Reliability
Improvement in production
Ease of use for end users

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Catalyst Center

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Meraki Dashboard, Cisco ThousandEyes

Dominic Romandi

Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at HCA (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use a dedicated pair at each hospital, with some remote anchoring to other sites within a "market" or outside if need be for guest traffic on dedicated internet circuits. The centralization and unified management interface has been fantastic, and the automated setup integration with DNAC is an added bonus.

Pros

unified management and operation interface(s)
automated setup integration with DNAC
built in troubleshooting tools to assist all levels of engineers

Cons

The biggest issues we have had have been software related. Requiring code upgrades or reloads to fix an unfixable problem.
Some of the troubleshooting utilities aren't perfectly clear as to what theyre doing or how to set them up or what to expect results wise or resource wise.
I think there is a lack of filtering in certain displays where you cannot use the "contains" option for certain device type filtering. But those options should be universal in all views.

Return on Investment

It has made management much easier
introducing new devices into our ecosystem is far simplified and saves many hours in the initial setup and troubleshooting any quirks
The anchor floating has enabled additional circuit savings.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller and Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller

Other Software Used

OneDrive, ServiceNow IT Operations Management, Atlassian Confluence

Daniel Cummins

Network Engineer II in Information Technology at The University of Kansas Health System (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's the central controller. There's actually two HA systems. So each data center has a wireless controller and about 2000 APs converged to each one, and that number's going to grow to about 3000 APs per controller and they're used in an Active-Active N+1 setup. So all of our wireless is done in central switching. We don't do any flex connect or local switching. So all wireless traffic converges to just these two boxes.

Pros

I think the updates are great. ISSU upgrading code is fantastic. I think the speed with which CAPWAP converges or reconverges, I think the redundancy mechanisms for roaming APs to other controllers is very good. I think overall, getting away from more of a monolithic processor where subprocesses handle what they call the WNCD tasks, I think fundamentally is an improvement in performance.
The radioactive tracing, all of the troubleshooting and all of the logging and all of the importing and exporting features for logging and analytics within the controller itself is really, really good compared to the predecessor AireOS.

Cons

The big one for me is tables. When you go to look at an inventory of an AP monitoring or a client monitoring, it truncates the list to only a hundred items in the view of this table, even if there's thousands or tens of thousands of entries. And so if you go to sort a column, it's only sorting the portion of the first 100 within the table view. That is a big shortcoming of the tool. Being able to filter and sort the live data as it's happening and the live traffic and interactions as it's happening is enormously helpful for a wireless engineer. Exporting that process with any kind of delay defeats the purpose of analyzing real-time issues. So being able to troubleshoot and review data at a glance is a huge lacking problem on this platform compared to its predecessor, the AireOS modern UI, or there's the classic view and the new view under the modern UI incorporated in like 8.3. It had a sortable table that let you filter and look at everything. So if I want to look at only the clients that are connected at one particular 8 0 2 11 protocol type, I can do that. If I want to sort it by data rates, I can do that. If I want to sort it by interference or SNR, I can do that on AireOS. I cannot do that on the 9800, and it is a big hurdle to being able to answer questions proficiently and quickly.

Return on Investment

It is a fair replacement for the 8540. It is mostly capable of being a one-to-one replacement, and so I would put it as a very net positive product. I don't think that there were a lot of pains in migrating from one platform to the other if again, you knew what you're doing in your design and able to make all that work predictably. And so very positive. I think overall it's been a very good solution of the one option out there. It was a very good solution.

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Infoblox DDI (BloxOne)

FortiAP

Ubiquiti WLAN, duplic

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

What is Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers?

Categories & Use Cases

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