This is just meant to be blog for me to document our transition from Cisco to Aruba, and kind of like a working notebook and place for me to think out loud.
We’ve very recently, in the span of 2 months, transitioned 80+ sites from being a Cisco/Dell network, wireless and wired respectively. 1300+ AP, and roughly 600 switches. While the transition has been done in record speed, tons of speed bumps have been hit at that same speed. From missed AP installs, misconfiguration of AP, lack of foresight on our MSPs behalf.
The first complaints we got was how poor the coverage was compared to our previous 2702i APs. That was temporarily alleviated by increasing the radio output. By default the Aruba was broadcasting at around 8-12dbm. Previously (due to poor/sparse AP coverage)our Cisco APs were broadcasting between 16-22dbm. As such, we’ve increased to match what we previously had. Over the course of the year we will be deploying another 2000+ APs to our sites with the goal of removing 2.4Ghz altogether. But as we deploy the APs per school, we can lower the minimum and maximum dbm output.
