Aruba Wireless Management System 7: Review

Edited for the UK by Peter Judge

Aruba Networks Wireless Management System (AWMS) 7.0 provides outstanding historical user tracking and excellent management capabilities both for Aruba and third-party wireless networking gear. Meanwhile, new management support for wired infrastructure components shows promise, but could stand fleshing out in both breadth of product support and depth of the management features offered.

AWMS is better known to the world as AirWave, a well-established wireless management tool, which supports wireless switches from multiple vendors. When Aruba bought Airwave in 2008, rather than turn the tool into an Aruba-only utility, Aruba promised to keep the Airwave brand going and extend the software’s multi-vendor strengths. In the UK, Aruba calls the product AWMS for copyright reasons, but the promise of multi-vendor support was renewed this year at the launch of AirWave 7 – or AWMS 7as we shall call it.

Bridging wired and wireless

This new version takes some baby steps to bridge the management divide between the wireless and wired networks in multivendor environments, a goal also touted by Hewlett-Packard as part of its “Single Pane of Glass” management campaign. Already well known for its Wi-Fi infrastructure and RF management prowess, the latest version of AWMS adds oversight and, in some cases, management capabilities for wired network devices (switches) as well as some endpoints.

Pricing is based on the modules licensed as well as the overall number of devices managed by the system. In the US, this works as follows: for a network that includes 200 managed devices (including wireless controllers, access points and switches), AWMS 7.0 costs $14,995 (£9800) for the software – which includes the AirWave Management Platform (AMP), VisualRF mapping software, and the RAPIDS rogue detection component.

Manages Cisco switches, monitors HP

I tested AWMS 7.0 in conjunction with an Aruba-based Wi-Fi network (an Aruba 651 Controller with Access Point, plus two Aruba AP-125s and two AP-105 802.11n access points), which provided both the over-the-air detection and device connection information to the AWMS platform. To gauge third party management features, I pulled a legacy Cisco Aironet 1200 access point and an assortment of older Cisco Catalyst (2900 series and 3550 series) and HP ProCurve (2626-PWR) switches under management as well.

I set up AWMS to automatically detect wired network devices, pointing AMP to automatically scan managed subnets for manageable devices. The scans look for SNMP- or HTTP-manageable network devices, based on the community strings or credentials I appended to the scan configuration. I could also manually add devices for management within AMP one by one, or in a batch by importing a CSV file.

The amount of control and oversight over wired infrastructure devices depends on AWMS’ level of support for the platform in question. At a bare minimum for completely unsupported devices, AWMS can monitor whether the device is up or down via ICMP. A medium tier of monitor-only support is offered for HP, Netgear and other networking products, while the premium configuration services are reserved primarily for Cisco Catalyst gear.

Prospective customers should definitely check Aruba’s list of supported devices before purchasing to ensure the needed level of support will be offered.