Hi All
I have dealt extensively with HP MSM series wireless specifically in Education environments.
I have had nothing but troubles with this wireless platform since it was introduced. There have been a number of issues that I have seen.
1. Their Auto channel and power management just does not work. I have had a stand up fight in my office with their lead product developer about this and he could not understand that not having effective channel and power management was a problem. Never mind the fact that I have 200 AP's that are simultaneously all using the same channel at full power at one school. When you do enable auto channel and power management the radios even through you say adjust a say 1 am in the morning, randomly throughout the day their radios will just switch off and go dark as they sort out their auto channel and power then funnily enough as all the radios are offline together they all pick the same channel at full power again. I had to manually tweak 200 AP's channel and power. Not fun in a supposed centrally managed wireless network.
2. I have seen massive interoperability issues with Apple devices on HP wireless. Random wireless dropouts connectivity issues etc. Windows based systems and adroid seem to be ok.
3. Support is terrible.
4. I have had one site where HP has replaced 200+ AP's not once but twice due to faulty batches of AP's and random faults that were occurring such as AP image corruption.
5. These issues happened mainly with the MSM 765 controllers and MSM422's which they no longer sell in Australia due to the issues but I have also seen similar issues with MSM460's.
6. They have a bug in their SNMP code which will result in having to restart the controller at regular intervals. Again not fun if heaven forbid you want to gather snmp traps.
7. Their controller does not fully support radius accounting, it does not pass the IP address to the accounting server which means that you are not able to integrate into a lot of proxy servers that now support radius accounting as a form of single sign on to the proxy.
8. Their wireless mesh will just stop passing trafic for no reason.
The company I work for has estimated that support HP MSM products has cost us in excess of $200,000 in support, time and revenue that we have been unable to bill anyone for. It has also cost the company in terms of reputation and customers.
Meanwhile we had also Been doing some smaller installs of Aruba Wireless and never had an issue. It finally took for myself and the other wireless engineer threatening to quit if we sold another HP wireless solution for the company to ditch the product.
Since then we have only sold Aruba and have never looked back.
Sure HP is cheaper but you get what you paid for. If you can get them to demo both systems and get them to enable features such as auto channel and power and watch their system fail.
Anyway that's my feelings on the subject. I hope that helps any of you out there that come up against it.