 Tom here from our systems. We're going to talk about the Aruba instant on and instant on is their new easy and as they kind of imply instant on system so you can manage Wi-Fi access points It is multi-tenant So as like an IT provider you can create different instances and different networks for your clients and manage them all through one cloud Portal and manage the switches and manage the access points that being said I wanted to make sure we get it up front. This was sent to me for review I have not deployed this any clients so all of my testing has been from me having this for a couple weeks and doing testing with it But not from any actual, you know use case in terms of large deployments at clients second There is no way to locally manage this. I just want to make sure that it's clear This has to be managed in the Aruba cloud system and it is fairly dropable I've done that more than once and has a problem and Second the switch itself can be managed in a cloud but does offer local management So the switch doesn't need to be tied to the cloud to work It doesn't need to be activated by the default out of the box You can either send it to their cloud interface and adopt it there and manage it there Or you can just go in and create local users and manage it and add all the features and we'll cover that when we get into the More details, but first before we get into all that let's feel like to learn more about me or my company Head over to Lawrence systems comm if you like to hire short project There's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel including a link to our patreon if you like become a patreon supporter We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time What's available and what's not so go ahead and check that out frequently and finally our forums If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out Say hi and talk tech our forums are a great place for that all right now back to the content And we'll start here at their website and start with some marketing speak the always-on network for the always-on business Aruba instant on by now, so they offer a series of switches and I currently have the new 1930 8 port POE with actually to SFP not SFP plus ports So this is all just a 1 gig not a 10 gig switch So that's the switch that we have actually the one that's right on top here in the picture and Much like there's namesake says it's instantly on you plug it in you adopt them into the network And you bring things into the portal and we'll cover the portal You know go through all the options on there So they have a handful of switches that support this and a handful of access points These are really designed for a lot of small businesses that need basic setup and basic access That's one of the nice things about them as they are fast to set up easy to use secure to you can trust You know all the marketing on here, but there really are where you're gonna see relatively easy to get up And running which is important so let's first start with the switch and take a look at it so we're gonna go over here and Let's look at this we have eight POE ports to SFP one gig ports a couple of light notifications to let you know the status of it We have the blinking when it's booting up and then a cloud when it's connected to cloud really straightforward and There's not much else to look at power spot on the back and a reset button on there Oh, if you didn't notice though, I do like this and it's from a small business perspective as a nice feature We have these so you can Wall mount this so if you want to push this against the wall is maybe if your target and their target audience does appear To be small business on these that's a nice feature being able to easily just wall mount it and it does come with rack Here so you may notice it's not the full width of a rack Which is actually nice when you only buy an eight port one But the rack ears we can put them on does give you that length that you're looking for so it will Be rack width when you put these on and this is all included within it didn't even open them up So we didn't bother rack mounting and so it's got that also of note and over here They include these and this is part of the wall mount so hardware wise This is nice to actually include this because sure I could figure out what screws go in here But what if I don't have those and I wanted to play these at a site without having to have you know Run over to the hardware store and get some extra ones in case there are ones I have aren't the right size Nice if that's included in there now other than that There's not much on the physical side to talk about it is Solidly built inside and passively cooled like I said with heat dissipation going on here And there's heat dissipation going on over here. So it's got the You know thermal pass to push the heat through the metal case on here and for the most part silent now I say silent, but the only but right here I don't know if you'll be able to pick it up or with the microphone pick it up at all It does have the slightest audible of high frequency when you have devices plugged into it It's very slight, but it's there for those wondering It's not anything that the decibel meter is even able to pick up. It's just my ears I can hear it kind of like almost like a high-pitched wine But it's very very slight and my ears are sensitive to that and not everyone's are so if you do hear it I then the microphone picks it up if not then I'm not I don't have a way to measure it because it's so slight And I just wanted to make note for those of you that do have Hearing at that high end and you can hear those slight high noises But anyways enough of that now let's look real quick though at before you dive into the actually login switch the hardware in terms of the AP-15 this is a simple design in terms of how it works They have this little clip here and at first I had to stare at it and I didn't you know read the manual right away Well, it's like hmm. That's interesting. I wonder why it's like that then I realized this width is for sticking on drop ceilings The little bars for a standard drop ceiling it clips right on there matter of fact it clips on really easy You just go up there It's kind of like you get an angle and twist and it locks into the rails up there and as far as how it locks onto here It's also super simple. You just twist In a way you go you're on there really easy to take on and off and then we have this one So same thing they're just twist lock and then you can twist it the other way and pull it back off Now this is made for like flesh rounding against a wall or something besides the rail one So the rail one has no screw holes in it So it's made just to attach a rail so it's actually a completely tool list design Which for putting up APs where you have to poke holes and the In the little acoustic phone things that are in there or the other challenges especially because this is not ways a lot But it weighs enough that if you were to do it on there Sometimes you've seen where they'll start to sag a little if they're if those ones especially if the the acoustic phones are thinner That you find in offices That may cause a problem clipping it on to the rail itself the rails Well, they're usually held up by wire and don't sag so you don't really have to revise an issue So I do like that they include that that's actually a nice feature And of course this for any time you got a screw mounted one thing of note because of the design of this It's not a flush mount. So even when you have this on there It is gonna hang down just a little bit So it's not going to you know, give you a nice clean flush mount But it's white on here and most of the acoustic tiles and most offices are white as well So it's gonna kind of still blend in for the most part Now in terms of looking at this there's not much to look at in terms of options We have an ethernet port which is PoE. We have a 12 volt port. We have a Kensington lock We have this that is undocumented But there's just a little thing you can plug in there and we do have a USB That I also didn't see a need for my guess is if somehow you manage to goof this up in some way that needs to be Reflashed that's probably what the USB is for so hardware wise though feels solid feels well made and I didn't take this apart Because it's got some special lock screws that apparently my bits don't fit I was curious maybe I'll order the right kit That will open these and maybe open it a later date I don't know if I do I'll post pictures on Twitter. It won't be part of this particular video So next thing is how do you get these set up and adopted? Well, the Aruba instant on portal is free So we'll go ahead and create an account which I already did and I actually been testing this at my house for about a week One thing I'm going to really note here though and this is going to be a gap in the video Well, I'll only gap you to you its instant for me It's an eight minute wait these things take about eight nine minutes to boot up and get ready to be logged into an adopted Which I think is a little slow But then again, you don't reboot commercial equipment all the time So it's not the end of the world and it just I don't know kind of strange to me that it takes as long as it does to Boot and re-adopt to the cloud But it's of note just be patient and when you're trying to adopt these it even says this could take up to Five minutes waiting for it when you go into the portal and you try to adopt one of these on here Now I'm not going to really spend a lot of time on it But yes, there is a phone app that you can adopt these with so if the phone's on local network And you can adopt them through the web interface for the portal either way is perfectly fine And I believe and I didn't need to use this but there is a serial number option where you can Punch in a serial number of a new device and have it adopted that way So a couple different ways to set these up and configure them no big deal It did like it said it adopted and went into the portal Now what we're going to log into first is going to be the switch and we're going to start with a locally managed switch This is one of the tricky parts of where the Aruba system works You can log into the switch and manage it locally or you can but not the same time use it in their web portal The web portal is limited functionality in terms of the switch, but full functionality in terms of the access point So the switch is it's almost better if you have any advanced use cases to manage them using the local interface But it's an either or you can't have them in both. You can't log into the local and also have the switch online I thought that was a little bit of a strange At least to me from a design standpoint, but it is how it is. It is how it is and that is how they designed it They'd also mentioned this is June of 29 2020 June of 2020 is what you're going to be looking at in terms of what the Aruba instant on portal looks like If at the later date and they said they're always adding features They add all the functionality switch to the portal that'd be great and maybe Do check with if you're interested in this product and you're watching in a future date Do check to see if those features have been added to the portal prior to if you're curious about that So as you can see it's still booting up and still I've been talking for a couple minutes But I'm gonna pause video here till the web interface becomes completely ready and we can log into it All right now I'm not going to go in depth on this but I will show you that yes the switch is up and running and working and Here's the options for it run through them real quick one thing I noted right away Is when you're setting up the system time and it takes a second to get this page here it Doesn't have this if it doesn't have the time right you can't put in time.google.com because It wants ipv4 in there. I thought that was a little strange It also our dhcp server has ntp servers in there And maybe that's why it didn't take it because it actually hands them out with a fully qualified domain name Now you can set these to static dhcp change of management port management vlan Also from the way you operate the switch you have the apply to Activate a setting now and save so you're saving it so on reboot That's something to note because some switches work that way some don't and this is you know Across probably more enterprise devices do work that way where you have like a apply now config versus A save on boot config and it's important to remember that because sometimes you apply a setting And it goofs up and you can restart it and come back But also I've seen people go in and configure things and not actually hit the little save button up here at the top And if you don't save it when you reboot you lose all those settings So one power outage away from some disaster where you thought you set it all up and you didn't hit save and yeah Way you go In terms of all the features switching port configuration port mirroring loop protection It's a full featured managed switch including A lot of details when you get into the vlan LLDP med now the LLDP is one complaint I have because this feature which is available on the switch is not available when the switch is inside of the portal And to me when you're trying to focus on a small business A lot of them have white phones if they only have one or two of them You probably would conveniently like them powered by this little poe switch and This seems like a good let's say a hair salon and we have a handful of those as clients Makes a good switch for them except I would have to leave it in locally managed mode to get LLDP med to work because when you turn on the cloud mode It doesn't work and we'll get to that because we're going to adopt it in the cloud before we're done here So neighbor discovery power over ethernet options. It gives the wattage Refresh to page It has scheduling options for it. There we go Takes a second. All right, and it tells you you can just mouse over shows how many watts are used on the ports You can fine tune all the adjustments on there Routing this is interesting because it does have routing options in here. So That's a nice that they've added those capabilities in here quality of service access controllers class of service and yes, you can tie this to a radius server for More fine-grain like 8021 x type controls and that's all under here under security. It's got radius server configuration dhcp snooping protected ports port security It does have all the diagnostics built in here too So you have the cold startup which also you can see logging started. So 11 39 11 40 for cold startup And where does it go device waiting for IP address? See if we can actually get an idea of how long it took to do some of these It's only a few minutes to boot on this But it's still like I said, it does take a few minutes before it becomes ready for adoption in the cloud But we also have ping trace route support file under maintenance It does have backup files. So you can do this. So update file transfer switch backup from the switch. So Next You want the active is back of your dark configuration running confirmation or error logs? So it does let you get a little fine-grained on there now reset This is where I was mentioning So I want to put this back into the portal But the only way for me to put this back into the portal is to actually factory set it because once you've logged into it Locally it you can't go back and forth and this is something I thought was a little strange Once we go here, we can just reset it to factory and that will allow me back to adopt it I am going to adopt it back into the aruba cloud here. So Like I said, it's it's an either or with the management on there Whether you want to manage it locally where you get all these features or you manage it through their cloud portal Where you get well fewer features. So we're going to reset this to factory defaults and adopt the system back Into the cloud. I just wanted to show that first before we went to the portal part All right now that we've reset the switch, we're ready to adopt it again It does take a minute though Like I had mentioned earlier and part of it is I was waiting for the ap to boot So first it reboots the switch and ap's take a little five or six minutes for them to reboot as well So there is at least that little bit of delay now You start with go ahead and add a device. You just go here to Add new devices it brings you to this it finds the device We're going to go ahead and add it and hopefully it won't ask me to reboot the ap and I don't think it will Okay, finish And now we're in the portal So it does now it's synchronizing the settings here, which is great And we see that this is uh booted up right here the ap 15. This is the inventory Now this is the base of the portal when you first log in and as I stated the portal is free There's not any fees associated with it and having the switch in the portal and having the access point here It will push automatic updates to them. So you'll have the latest firmware So that's what's going to do right now. I'd actually done this before I had them back and forth in and out Neat things about the portal you can go here and add networks. So we have the ltf's office site It is multi-tenant multi-site manageable and you set these up here So you can go to site management manage this site Here's the account that I have with there delete the site and there is the option to transfer ownership or rename a site set the time zone set up a configure a guest portal on a per site basis and Here's the software updates and you can choose when you want those software updates to happen So we'll go back over here to site management And home and then we're back to where you started now networks This is the wired network and we can add another one if we wanted So wired give it a network name assign a vlan id to it. It does allow that to propagate between the switches and the access points or you add a new wireless and choose what kind of usage you want And the wireless as you can see has a lot more options within here So we're going to go ahead and look at the ones we already have set up And we have this one and I took this home and use it for a while and I wanted to get some dpi data But I kind of failed because I didn't realize that doesn't see all those devices for a little while as I Took it home for a week. I brought it back and I brought it back on Turned it off on a Friday and here it is Monday doing your review on June 29th And all those stats just kind of fade away out of there We'll cover what that means, but it's basically all the application level stats for usage It doesn't have much information in here other than what it found now This is the dpi feature and I will admit I just want to cover this real quick The dpi deep packet inspection feature a lot of people ask about this It's really rudimentary and it's done at the access point level not at the switch level that I can tell And it's it gives you the most basic of information It says 299 meg of web And when I was using at home it would just say streaming lots of streaming because we had our chromecasts And we watched netflix and prime That was connected to it and we have aroku so those devices just show up as streaming devices But not real actionable detailed intelligence So if you're wondering about the dpi it does say it but of course the death is in the details The details are really really light. So it kind of just tells you that The general usage not much information on there. It does have some restrictive options To you could say hey, I don't want these and filter out like don't allow because it's why it's got the allow you So you can uncheck and say we don't want adult content on our network But it's also not fine grain. It doesn't give you detailed control over it And by the way of any level of encryption because they can't peel out layers of encryption It's not going to know what the sites that people are going to if there's levels of encryption or VPNs in you So it's there, but I'm not going to spend too much time on it because it's not it's not much of a feature Now we go back over here with identification. You may have noticed we do have support for Network psk wp2 wp3. I seen no option to go fall back They're occasionally for people that have legacy use cases. They may want it to go through like web I know it shouldn't be used in 2020 There are edge cases we've seen where people may want that it only has these options You're looking at all of them here It does have if you're putting this in a larger network The ability to use a radius server for authentication and a secondary backup radius server So that is an option if you wanted to get more advanced on there Then we go over here to options. We got a bandwidth usage unlimited or you can set these options 25 10 5 one and That's it. So everything about this is kind of cut down in basic But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing for most people looking for a simple access point This will work 2.4 and 5 gigahertz 2.4 or 5 only Extend 2.4 range allow far away 2.4 clients connect with enabling lower data rates may slow down network performance This is actually a feature in the way wi-fi works where if there's a really slow further way client it may Caught be detrimental to the local Local closer clients that are attaching to it. So that's a feature you can able I mean play with some of the range testing it later. It goes on beyond the scope of this particular video It does have wi-fi scheduling options. So you can schedule when you want this on off, etc Unrestricted access restricted access and this is where you can you know filter things a bit and then the application options That are at the end there, but we're not using right now Now can you add more than one wi-fi network? Yes, uh, this is an option so you can add Well at least six networks. I had to take a little bit in the documentation It looks like and I found this in a forum post after doing a little reading that there's a maximum of 16 networks you can support I didn't feel like creating 16 of them, but I created these and as you can see they're pretty easy to create Just click add and go now instant on Number of clients is interesting I found wanted to bring this up and while this is a forum post By one of their staff members it's labeled as employee on their forums And it says the client limit because this is not the ssid limit when I was trying to find this I thought this would be of interest to people too the client limit for ruben instant on per ssid per ap This is how many people can attach tonight. It's interesting. It's per ssid So the ap 15, which is the one we're testing The ap 15 has up to a hundred clients per access point So the limit is 64 connecting to a single ap ssid at 2.4 another 64 Connecting to the same ssid at 5 you can also add a second ssid with this with the same max number of clients On the ap second ssid each ssid has its own limits But at that point you'll hit another limit, which is the upper limit of total clients at the ap That's it. So There's a little bit. I'll leave a link to this particular forum post I thought was interesting the way they do it So the maximum number of clients on this right now is only 100 And but it's cumulative between the ssid's and there's a little bit of confusion when I was reading through it But that's why I wanted to share it with you and let you guys read the links on there And this was as of 127 2020. So it was a few months ago. So there's anything changed I didn't find at least maybe through my basic searching didn't find this directly in the documentation Which is also why people were asking in a forum post about this because they didn't find it either All right back to the portal So this is all the wi-fi portals and of course, this is the settings for the Wired side of the network and this is where things get a little basic as I showed you This is a very advanced switch with all kinds of great features that all get well Taking away when you put it into the portal here. So now let's look and go through the inventory And look at the switch itself now. So we can go to connectivity We can set a static IP address we can we know that this is the one connected for uplink It puts a little cloud there, which is nice Then we have all the different switch options. You can activate deactivate name the port. It knows well Not there's a link turn on port control Include all networks to fault or specify only network. So you can create the tagged and untagged ports So you can control the v-lands there Actually, I think I got to cancel that because it thinks I want to change something go here to networks set the Tag done tagged for particular ports link aggregation options And now we reach the end of the options on there They will hopefully in the future add more features to it But right now that's all you can do with this switch and maybe for most people That's perfectly fine being able to set tags and v-lands But it just seems like a shame to have all these advanced routing features in this switch And all the different options it has but not be able to use any of them Or even have an option of logging in locally because you have to switch to the local management Which removes it essentially from here So if we switch to local management just like it says here removes device from the site as well as configuration and Knowledge within the instant portal on the last known configuration will be kept So it does keep the configuration, but you then have to manage it locally So if you had set some v-lands up inside of here, it will retain those But then the device has to be managed locally. So I thought I'd bring that up Now i'm not going to spend much time showing you the app But they do have a phone app and the phone app seems to have most of the same functionality as this You can go through control. It looks the same. It's just kind of a mobile responsive version of it wrapped into an app It also has notifications. It can send you if a device goes offline or online Also of note, you can only add up to 25 access points per site So if you have a job larger than 25 access points, the rub instant on is not going to be the one for you So it's just worth noting of that um in terms of functionality Now other than the dpi data being kind of like a marketing term more sort of than useful It at least it's there So you do have an idea or get some clue as to what the users are doing The other thing on there and I didn't test this but it does have the option not just for captive portal But for captive portal with facebook and I didn't feel like setting it up on my facebook account and doing the sign in But that is something I've seen that was in there So some people ask hey, how hard is that to do if you want them to log into facebook My personal opinion on captive portals is there a nightmare? And generally because people have such good wi-fi Free everywhere or have really good 4g signals People will go to the free one. I've even seen this where a restaurant was like, hey, we're not getting many people Since we put the captive portal on I'm like, yeah, you're adjacent to the restaurant that gives free wi-fi next door And even myself, I don't like signing into captive portals. My phone if it's not going to do it automatically I'll just use my 4g on my phone So I'm never a fan of captive portals. I'm not going to rant too much about that But it is an option on these devices. So in my overall, I don't think these are bad. I do like them I just wish they had more features on the switch Um, I don't know at this moment because I've only done a little bit of testing I can't say whether or not I would run out and start deploying these to the client the good and bad of having a switch that Um can be locally managed obviously I like the local management but bad because its features are kind of nerfed But when it comes to the access points the good and bad about there really easy setup You're looking for no hosting fees. No anything just throw it in the cloud manage it See your client sites and all that awesome the downside The portal Will support these as long as the portal supports these when's the end of life on these? When's that? I mean there are rubas a big company But if they make some type of business change where they decide not to support these there is no local management feature on this These um are only as good as long as that portal supports the devices if they eliminate the portal I will admit They will probably do the last known configuration and continue working But you won't be able to get into them to update or change or modify settings on them anymore on that case So I just wanted to at least throw that out there because this is something i've seen with a lot of products that have Cloud portals where you have no local controller management over if that company makes a change in policy You are always subjected to that change because there's not a locally way to manage it And this is true for a lot of iot devices But it's also true for these particular devices So while they don't have licensing fees, they will only work as long as that portal allows them to work. So Oh, those are my thoughts on it And if anyone does know and if i'm wrong about uh, there are some ways to locally manage it I did not see it in a documentation But if you do know a way feel free to leave a link and I will do a follow-up video on how to locally manage These access points But overall they work and I will probably do at least more follow-up video on some range testing Because I know a lot of people ask about that I can test range testing speed It worked as advertised when it comes to speed but getting really fine-grain Speed test is really hard because well, I've talked about this before on my channel when it comes to wi-fi Really minor things can make a difference in terms of that But I at least can probably stack these up to at least one more Access point and do at least a range test and a general speed test and try to get some averages But that'll be a future video's oscilloscope for this one I just want to introduce you to these products so people can start looking at them and Let me know what you think. 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