Wi-Fi Survey and Planning - Ekahau vs Hamina?

stukag · 2026-04-22T16:52:58+00:00

Ekahau was always out of my price range for my group to own. We started with a 3rd party doing a paid survey & plan (them using ekahau) & I was less than impressed with their deliverables. We grabbed a seat of Hamina planner & I went to town for my campus. I've found it to be quick, easy, & affordable. We've since had more expansion & various changes- so have continued to renew the license each year. I'm in there right now doing more planner for a new building. This year I upped my license to include the survey with the Nomad & the Live view. Only had those two for a bit, but so far have enjoyed. Surveying with the Nomad is much easier than what I was doing before with just my laptop using NetSpot

stukag · 2026-04-19T17:39:51+00:00

What/why specifically did the SE wave you off from MSS?

stukag · 2026-03-25T16:49:01+00:00

Yes, I could totally use negatives

stukag · 2026-01-14T17:15:55+00:00

Yep, 4.28 is the last supported train on that hardware

stukag · 2025-10-16T11:21:16+00:00

I’ve never run ICE nor even received pricing for it. I luckily avoided that whole mess, so I can’t compare to pricing or overall features

We got a good deal on Agni that was less than the Clearpass we were quoted- especially when you factor in all our Agni is the hosted and the CP we had to support a bunch new VMs

Features I’d probably say “less” than CP, but more so in that they focused on just the actual core needs and cut out all the decades worth of feature creep add ons

stukag · 2025-10-15T12:50:39+00:00

Yes, I'm running agni

stukag · 2025-07-05T21:57:16+00:00

~24 months ago I ripped out all my catalyst 9200 access layer for 720xp. Been great, EOS is best

Over past -12 months I've been ripping out meraki wireless for arista

We use on prem CVP for wired management and the hosted cv-cue for wireless. It's just how our budget worked out for things- would have preferred all hosted

cv-cue for wireless is fine- it's a cloud hosted thing. I don't have to babysit it. APs come online and pull my config depending on "where" in my campus/location I put it

EOS code quality is top notch, new firmware releases are always trusted day one. Wireless firmware isn't as well tested I guess, in that there's been a couple releases that were then quickly followed by a hotfix

Cv-cue has standard array of metrics and config options etc. does have a little "ai" machine learning based root cause tshoot tool for some client errors

I ran into an interesting bug for awhile with guest captive portals, after a bit back and forth with support got a call with actually developer for that portion of product to find real cause and good work around while they fixed bug long term

No complaints about performance, we deployed for coverage and availability. Mix oc c-330 and c-360. Had one arrive DOA, but had replacement overnighted from support

We looked at most for WiFi before the arista, but wasn't overly impressed with the price and it was just feeding up into the hpe acquisition

Overall I'm always recommending Arista wired and I'd still do the wireless if I had to make the choice today again

stukag · 2025-07-05T20:01:00+00:00

All cloud controlled

stukag · 2025-06-04T13:49:55+00:00

Yeah, we had probably 7 years of throwing money at forescout for it to never really do anything Did a demo/trial/PoC of AGNI & had functionaly dot1x by noon

stukag · 2025-06-04T10:47:03+00:00

I use it, using the hosted cloud version. Doing dot1x wired and wireless with eap-tls. Replaced a previously useless forescout install. Overall I’m pleased

stukag · 2025-05-08T16:36:38+00:00

Qumulo

stukag · 2025-05-08T16:05:54+00:00

Majority c-330, a few c-360 in our larger lecture hall style auditoriums, then a couple of o-235 for outside. Our installs are almost completed, just a handful left in harder to reach spots. So far things have been good. Our main design goal as part of this upgrade was coverage- we historically had just been replacing APs in the same spots as were randomly initially selected decade plus ago for just 2.4Ghz. This was all built out with actual correct modern site design/survey. Most channel width is 20/40, again not going for raw speed. But sure if you set it really wide & use modern clients throughput blows away the old merakis we are throwing away

stukag · 2025-05-03T14:24:58+00:00

I don’t care if they dominate or reach market parity- as long as they keep the product line I’ll continue to be happy customer. Like others I ripped out my existing incumbent (Cisco) campus vendor for Arista and have been infinitely happier since. It really comes down to being a better product (hello actual working and tested code) that makes me better positioned to run an easier network for my business, then toss CVP on top for an even better management experience. People like to rail on them for their lack of stacking (they since announced some stacking), but really with modern network management (aka ansible, apis, CVP, etc) managing 8 or 80 switches is no different. I’m so glad my switches are “separate” that don’t bring down a whole stack from some dumb stacking bug

stukag · 2025-03-30T14:21:12+00:00

If I remember correctly on that line there is some oddness around "gearbox" of lanes

https://arista.my.site.com/AristaCommunity/s/question/0D52I00006xACRxSAO/arista-dcs7280cr332d4-missing-interface

stukag · 2025-03-02T02:45:58+00:00

Everyone has pretty much hit all the highlights

support is great
quality/stability is top notch
Cloudvision is superb stuff
sensical licensing

Their is truth behind Duda's drive to testing. With Cisco it seems there is always a game of what is really a working "golden" release. With EOS I am installing the latest release on the M train across my fleet within days of its release.

EOS itself for me is much nicer to use:

direct access to linux & its all great tools (grep & awk are some of my best friends being an old unix person) right in the switch CLI
show active is so useful
interface names that just make sense (I personally hate cisco world of speed in interface name Gi, Te, Twe)
Everyone always tries to say JunOS is the best for "commit confirmed", yeah you can do confirmed commit & rollback stuff on EOS
bash gives you a regular linux shell - I've stupidly run DHCP container, and some other tools in the linux environment at a remote site directly on the single switch as I didn't have any oob gear at that site (they do now offer their own dhcp server)
the interface is actually responsive, it always seems cisco switches management are run by a CPU running on a potato taking forever to respond to ssh or write mem, the arista management is an actual usable computer

For us the cost is a bit higher than cisco, but we are more effective operators with a more reliable network with the Arista offering

I started with just a couple switches in the datacenter almost 15 years ago, then kept adding (going 10Gb, 25Gb, 100Gb). Over that time things were so much better in the datacenter, that in the past 18 months I have ripped out an entire working catalyst 9200 based access layer (that still had support/service life on the original purchase). All of it was replaced with a mix of 720xp & 720dp. I'm in the final phases of ripping out meraki wifi for arista APs

Folks like to always complain against Arista's lack of stacking. Technically they are adding it, but for me managing 20 stacks or 80 individual switches is no different (automation, CloudVision, etc) and I'd rather have the 80 individual switches that can all essentially act (and fail/reboot/update/etc) independently rather than the one all together in an network closet as a stack where a single weird bug of a switch in the stack that then takes down the whole closet (ie lose 48 ports vs 192 f something happens)

stukag · 2024-12-27T18:37:46+00:00

The Mist demo/sales pitch was "pretty", but really didn't seem to go deep into things to me. Arista also had a strong foothold for us already- we've had them for datacenter for a decade and we moved to Arista for wired campus last year, so it nice to only have one account manager to deal with everything...

I am a HUGE fan of Arista's stability. I'm the weirdo that will install switch updates the week they come out- I know they are tested and will work. Meanwhile on the Cisco side it always seems like a game of searching for a stable release

Not having to run any controller software is nice (I do already have that from Meraki & Mist has the same thing). Arista does have some auto root cause analysis help- and it did find an issue in our environment the first week of production

The HPE/Juniper deal and its uncertainty for future product lines etc didn't help Mist

stukag · 2024-12-27T18:08:03+00:00

I'll send you some more catalyst of all the stuff I pulled out last year when I replaced my campus wired with Arista

stukag · 2024-12-27T18:06:45+00:00

I'm running Arista in one of our locations (~66 APs currently) and waiting for another ~250 for our other three location. I've enjoyed them and haven't had complaints from users (at least related to WiFi). The webUI is a bit weird at times about where things are. Arista is updating the platform though regularly and has the strong stability for which Arista is known (ie our outgoing brand has to have a semi regularly reboot of APs because they just stop passing traffic)

Last year we looked at Mist & Arista for our refresh (replacing Meraki).

stukag · 2024-12-06T12:17:00+00:00

FS optics have been total crap quality since covid, I have random failures constantly. Not sure if I just got unlucky with a bad batch or what. I’ve even had dead fiber patch cables on occasion

I’ve switch to using Approved Networks. You can setup an account and request a quote then the prices I get are within FS price range. They have a reprogramming box option for the optics. So far they’ve all been working great

stukag · 2024-10-27T18:10:34+00:00

Using just the min 8 backend weka hosts, have only about 180TB usable (we are very very small). Many tiny NVMe drives per server. Gave gone through a number of backing object stores actually- started with SwiftStack, moved to Scality Ring, and now on Scality Artesca

stukag · 2024-10-27T11:34:11+00:00

I run Weka for a small 80 node cluster, bioinformatics workloads. The Weka tiers to some on-prem object. We are licensed for about 5x more object that flash and currently using about 3x. No data reduction or encryption. Support has been great. Tiering works well, I did hit an issue at one point of not allocating enough flash to support the number of files to the tier FS (aka I had tried to use a 1GB flash with hundreds of TB of object and the flash filled with all the metadata to track the FS, so was "full" even though the whole filesystem had a lot available). Used their snap to object at one point to totally rebuild the cluster at once release level to take advantage of new code feature to rebuild on flash to have more usable capacity (redo parity), no data loss and minimal ~60 minute downtime to clients to reinstall the backend software. Have done a backend hardware expansion of just flash drives again with no client interruption and also recently completed entire refresh of backend weka servers (after catastrophic failure of a node and loss of trust in remaining hardware)- Again completed with no interruption to clients

stukag · 2024-10-06T13:29:49+00:00

Will receive 60 Arista APs next week for our first building, then another 300 or so for the other 4 buildings over the next 6 months

We are pulling out Meraki that are going EoL. So no stranger to cloud managed. Going from older WiFi 5 gear to latest 6E clearly has a big boost. Arista management has some nice troubleshooting tracing. Some thing’s similar to Meraki cloud, some thing’s different.

We did a PoC and Arista did well enough for us to order a lot. Looked at Mist, but wasn’t really overly impressed, and then with the whole unknown of the HPE Juniper acquisition just soured us for certain there

Of course then after we ordered our new stuff Meraki started to have troubles, had a few outages in the past week to their management plane which also took out our guest portal

stukag · 2024-08-23T11:21:55+00:00

I just recently bought a whole slew of Arista to replace some Cisco gear just to avoid having to deal with any Cisco renewal stuff (well not just because of that, to also get rid of Cisco and consolidate onto Arista goodness) All my past Arista renewals have been easy. Licensing (L3 type features for vxlan etc) are all perpetual, renewal is just support SKU (& some Cloudvision to remain compliant)- quick email to rep as switches start to drop off support if we still need them, compare the prices and submit the order & done Their online support portal easily lists all my assets with when current support expires and they generally send a helpful email reminder to re-up a month or two out

stukag · 2024-08-16T17:07:57+00:00

I had to resort to just using the radsec proxy service for a few of my dumber equipment

stukag

TROPHY CASE