Working on a medium sized office network which only has a single PoE switch for WAPs. About 200 users. No copper to the desk… It made sense to buy a second PoE switch to give a bit of redundancy, even if it’s for manually swapping cables in case switch A dies.
Plug in switch, wait for power up and decide to test the manual failover over lunch. Gateway plugged in, flashing lights. WAPs plugged in, flashing lights. Wireless network visible but can’t connect as there’s no DHCP. Swap everything back and we’re back in business.
The switch is unuseable until I’ve installed an app, created an account, onboarded to a “cloud” and configured from my phone.
Oh HP, how you have fallen from the rock-solid days of procurves and have degenerated to the unfortunately named Aruba “Always On”
Rant over.
I would have packed the fucker back up in the original box and sent it back. Fuck your app, HP. Oh, and fuck your printers, too.
Do you mean Aruba “Instant On”? If so, you are withholding some important bit of information.
They are perfectly usable without an app or cloud console. Will get DHCP IP and you can log in to the local web interface and manage it that way. The caveat is that it has to be VLAN1.
I have two of these switches, and after the first configuration you can also just change the management VLAN, so you can manage them from any VLAN after setting it up once.
Return it and get something dumber
I think you misunderstood the target audience of the Aruba instant on series. It’s a direct competitor to the Ubiquiti Unifi brand and solely designed for easy centralized management. You manage multiple sites from a single pane of glass. I work for an MSP and we use them all over the place for the ease of management it gives us. One dashboard to see our out clients switches and access points. If this isn’t you, then you’re not the target audience, but that doesn’t make it bad.
With that said, if you spent a little more time researching, then you would have found that these switches can be converted to FULLY local management. Absolutely no cloud. It even has more features when locally managed.
It’s not the fault of the product if you purchase a device without due diligence into the feature, support, configuration, management, etc.
Like others stated, if it’s an Aruba Instant On switch, it’s easily configurable without any app or registration.
I actually really appreciate just whipping out my phone and hitting “Adopt” when I am setting up new hardware at a site (UniFi stuff). It gets added, updated, and it’s done. Then I can leave and go manage it from the office.
