Wireless Access

Is it intended that upgrading to 8.0 does a factory wipe of your controller? I understand it's a pretty radical upgrade but a factory wipe seems a bit harsh :P

Or is 8.0 intended to ONLY be used in combination with a VM Mobility Master?

And before anyone says something.. I did read the releasenotes.. just not all the other manuals.

So most importantly, and I'm sorry you hit this, there's no 'upgrade' (in the classic sense of the word) process for 6.x to 8.0. A mobility manager (MM) is required in MOST cases as the intent is that the MM manages every config element of the locals (d of the local's IP). You CAN run a single controller in stand-alone mode with 8.0 but as stated before, there's no 'upgrade' path. 

We have some migration tools that HPE Aruba's TMEs (like myself) are scrambling to get a feel for and get documentation out to the field and partners/customers ASAP, but it's going to take time as the final tool was only released a few weeks ago and it requires some time for us to get a handle on it to get it documented. 

For now, since 8.0 is accessible, I would engage your local account team for help (though be aware they may be as new to it as you are). 8.0 is a pretty big tectonic shift in how the controllers are managed, so it's best to be done in a lab environment with controllers NOT in production until we can get more field digestible information out. 

Our target is officially Sept 1 to have everything done on our list, but we are prioritizing the early aspects (MM install and config, migration process, etc) and we will be releasing that to the Aruba SEs and partners as soon as they are completed. For me, I will be spending most of Thursday getting the migration tool run through it's paces and hope to have some collateral by next week. I also will be doing the installation instructional videos and PPTs as well (which I have already done but have to re-record as engineering made some last minute process changes that I have to account for). 

So please be patient, this was a bit of a Ready-Fire-Aim release in that engineering got it out to get some field soak in to it, but our TME and field is pretty much seeing it in it's final form at the same time as our customer base :) It's awesome stuff! Just very, very new. Thanks for your patience

Hehe, no worries. I wouldn't install this on any production controller other than my home/lab controller.

You say most cases will be using a mobility manager. But that's only true for larger deployements (of which we have few) right?

Or is there a reason I would waste VM resources on a simple master+local setup? 

You have an MVP tag so I assumed it was lab (was hoping heh).

So there are some features that are explicitly tied to Mobility Manager on VM. That list will be getting published soon by TME but in general the biggies are AirMatch (new ARM), NBAPI (NorthBound API), and some other features that require the MM to run them. Unfortunatley some of this is still getting fleshed out, but it should start leaking out to the field for better guidance.

Well, I went back to 6.4 for now.. too many weird stuff I need to look into first.

Couldn't get my simple network back up and running! 

Finding the ap-group config menu required some time. Then trying to add a group via GUI seemed impossible. And even after configuring the group via CLI it wouldn't show up in GUI.

When configuring an PSK SSID I forgot to add the .1x profile to its aaa-profile.. very usefull (NOT) error that gave in the GUI lol. I guess this release realy is meant for labs and people with some time.

Anyway, thank you for your insight regarding this new release. 

It's very fresh and VERY different. If you are time constrained, I would wait until Sept to get some collateral from TME on the different config and operational aspects of 8.0. 8.0 is very much an Early/Engineering release to sate those that want to see it and get their hands on it sooner rather than later, and have the inclination and time to poke around on it. Otherwise, move to AOS 6.5 and to see some of the new 6.5 features.