Network Management

Hi everybody,

Does anyone have a comparative about IMC vs Airwave?  What are the pros and cons of both management solutions?

I'm not an expert at IMC, but from what I've seen, I can generalize things as:

IMC:

Geared towards what's in your data center, the wired side of things.  It provides in-depth visibility into ports with a capturing path from the gateway uplink to the edge switches - and knowledge of the what terminates on those edge switch ports.  This is infrastructure troubleshooting.

AirWave:

View of both the WLAN and the LAN.  A view from the client association path through the APs, controllers, and switches.  Provides trending and reporting, as well as alerts.  I consider this client side troubleshooting, meant to provide clients the best QOS.  There's also a roadmap to increase LAN visibility to be comparable to IMC.

Wired:

If you're dealing with only wired side issues, IMC is the current path.

Wireless:

If you're looking for coverage of the wireless, then AirWave is the way to go.

Both:

If you're looking for wired and wireless, you might try AirWave alone.  Since the wired coverage isn't complete in AirWave, you might also consider trying to run both products.

If you're looking for wireless management, Airwave is the way to go. If you use Aruba Mobility switches (now end-of-sale), Airwave is also the best way to manage those. If you have other types of switches (including HPE Aruba, previously Procurve) I find that IMC is the better choice. Easier to do firmware upgrades, pushing config changes etc. Also if you have large heterogenous networks or wants to monitor your data center it looks like IMC is better than Airwave. We use both.