Cloud Managed Networks

Has anyone done the migration from Airwave/MM to Central in a usual enterprise network? (We don't have many new branch sites popping up all the time in that case Central would of course be more natural choice).

I think we should keep the main campuses with hundreds of APs in MM but maybe we could migrate everything in the branches to Central.

Wondering as I've been looking at SD-WAN stuff and seems that Central licenses to switches/APs are about the same as Central subscription anyways, so maybe just have all the equipment in the Central.

What kind of benefits I could expect? "Ease of management" is always there when talking about cloud managed, but as we're trying to go towards user-based tunneling the switch setup should be pretty same in the future anyways and not many changes. Also Central doesn't seem to support that well 802.1x/ubt configs, you'd need to do those with templates? I don't have configs ready in the central yet, does it provide any monitoring capabilities for tunneling?

As the Central doesn't support ArubaOS-CX yet, what kind of different things I could expect from Central with 2930F compared to running NetEdit+Airwave wth 6300F? If I'm not missing anything from CX features (we're not looking to implement EVPN in the branches) I could at least get cheaper switches

Thanks for any thoughts!

In brief, Aruba Central is the way forward as more services are moving to the cloud. If you already have an existing deployment based on Airwave/MM and it is meeting your requirements, there is no need to migrate it to Central now. However, you should seriously consider Aruba Central for new projects or refreshing existing setups. Aruba Central offers several key benefits as explained here https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_ArubaCentral.pdf

I think you should specify your business and technical requirements first, before choosing the solution. Don't focus on which is cheaper but think about your requirements first and what pain points should be addressed. Some points to consider are:

1) How big is your network? Think about the scale of your network and how it can grow..

2) How big is the team managing the network? How often do you deploy new sites? Do you have engineers/technicians in the new sites?

3) Are you considering SD-WAN solution now? In future? How are you inter-connecting the different sites?

4) What is the technical "skill-set" of the engineers managing the network? Do you prefer to have a unified management platform for WLAN, LAN, VPN and SD-WAN?

5) What is the timeline for this project? It is true that AOS-CX switches are not supported today in Central but they will be supported soon. Also cheaper AOS-CX will be available.

6) How important are APIs in your environment?

7) Think about subscription vs perpetual licenses..

Think about integrating with your private services running in AWS/Amazon/GCP (if any)

Luckily, you have investment protection with Aruba Hardware and you can move between on-prem management or cloud management as needed.

Ayman

Thanks for your reply. I wasn't really clear in the first post and "migrating" meant "migrating the way we manage stuff in the future" So for new sites only, and those that need refresh. It's not a single project but the network keeps evolving al lthe time...

Our guys are good and currently we have enough people to do the installations too. We will have new sites coming up but it's nothing like retail where you could have new sites every day. Nothing we couldn't handle with airwave/MM today.

We're considering Aruba SD-WAN as we like the idea of the dynamic segmentation, and it'd be easier to just terminate the tunnels on the branch instead of sending all the traffic to our DC (which is what we do currently). Though the firewall rules are simpler as they are only in the DC FW, going with Aruba SD-WAN we would need to distribute those rules to every gateway everywhere (to block the traffic between two different branch segments too)

I'd like the idea of a single pane management but as we're in the public sector we don't have the budget to replace working gear to go there. And it's quite hard to sell the idea too even if we had the money I think, as the network seems to be working fairly well now. Though we don't have much idea what happens in the network but it works

APIs are not very interesting to us. I've heard there's 6200F coming but there should be a real world advantage to get the CX-series and not just "it's the future"

Oh and the requirements, I don't think we have any special requirements that would direct us to on-prem or cloud in the future. I think both solutions would work just fine. It's also one reason I look at the money (besides being in the public sector) as if we don't get any real benefit from the cloud we shouldn't go there if it costs more.

Host Name or IP Address-Enter the IP address of the AirWave Management Platform AMP User-Enter the user name for any administrative user.PasswordEnter the password associated with the administrative account.Confirm PasswordRe-enter the password.