Hi all,
Sometimes, as network admins and implementation engineers, we rarely get a visual representation of a configuration change that is aimed at improving performance. We make the changes, check the config and wait to hear back from the user community. Rarely do we hear about improvements. We only hear back when things get worse. Sometimes we don't hear anything at all.
The opportunity to see a change's impact greatly increase when a customer has AirWave. I have a customer that has grown over the years and they gone from the very early days of AOS 2.5 and are currently running AOS 6.1. With their growth and AOS changes their configuration collected unwanted and unnoticed 'artifacts'. This is not an uncommon scenarior for many, time tested Aruba customers. Sometimes some pretty basic changes can be overlooked at older customers and small changes can be made to dramatically improve performance.
This particular customer still had the very low g-basic rates turned on all of their SSID's and still had some low g-tx-rates set. In an annual configuration audit, I spoke with them about turning off those rates as their 2.4 GHz utilization was quite high even in buildings that had very few active clients. They agreed to change and we implemented at 8am this morning.
Here is the graphical representation of the utilization rates DRAMATICALLY decreasing. I don't get to see this too often and it makes my inner Airhead very, very happy to see. The radio represented is the 2.4GHz radio in an AP135. The AP is in an decades old brick and cinder block building full of classrooms. The deployment is bascially one ap every other classroom, and AP's are staggered to account for floors and hallways.
The new rates for the config are:
g-basic-rates 11 12
g-tx-rates 11 12 18 24 36 48 54
Small changes....big results!
B