Network Management

Currently managing IMC, Airwave, and Netedit, but I keep being informed by sales to start migrating to Central Cloud. Am I stuck in my old ways of not wanting to move? Has anyone started or finished migrating from the older services? I've been able to get CX switches to monitor properly in IMC for now. 

We have 300 switches and 1600 APs to monitor. 

Hello WarrenT

Monitor or Manage?

1600 Instant AP? Or Controller managed?

300 CX Switches? Or a mix of various HPE switches?

Central is where Aruba is pushing all new functionality so it definately should be on your agenda.

ZTP with Central is a breeze, as is config and firmware updates. Troubleshooting and reporting, AI insights etc. Migration will be somewhat painful - as you would likely have to factory reset the device to get it into Central. I would say it works best in a Wired scenario where you have either dynamic ports or atleast the same config for most switches. Device specific config is of course possible, but more time consuming for migration.

If you ever want to go AOS10 on your APs then Central is the only way to go.

Mostly monitoring right now. I do push some config changes with IMC for campus wide changes

These are all controller managed APs. We have 8 controllers in total which includes 5 remote sites that each have a physical controller. 

I've got a large mix of switches. I still have a ton of provision switches out there. Some are as old as 2510 and even 2650s, but as money comes, I've moving everything over to the CX line.

With my last order of equipment, I asked them to include Central licenses to start setting it up. I guess I can always just slowly migrate away from IMC, and hope that they start budgeting for the yearly costs of having Central. I know for sure we can't afford on-prem at this point. I just don't want to make a mistake on this that we can't afford, as we're a smaller college with only around 7K students and around 4K living on campus. I try to be very conscientious about the money I spend. It looks like I'll either have it easy with doing configuration with Central, or I'll need to start using REST api and python scripting to automate some of this. 

Thanks for your advice John!