The Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.
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Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller
Score 9.1 out of 10
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The Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller on Catalyst Access Points (EWC-AP) is a next-generation Wi-Fi solution, combining an advanced controller – the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers – with a Wi-Fi 6 access point – the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points – to create a wireless experience for evolving and growing organization.
I really like central switching. Central switching is converging all of the tunnels, fewer people can administer the product. It's much easier to scale, it's much easier to configure and it's much easier to get predictable results out of that. I have run FlexConnect before under AireOS. I'm proficient with it. But yeah, I think as a centralized controller it works very well. And I think as building redundancy with regard to not just HA-SSO but with an N plus one design, I think the scheme and logic and architecture of the platform is very well thought out and I don't know what use cases I would find it to be lacking. There's a few things when you drill into it, it actually is not that simple. AireOS I feel like was a lot simpler. I think the catalyst, how it breaks out the hierarchy of configuration requires each of these tags and profiles and policies and how you bring them together. Actually, even though they've decoupled a lot of these elements from how AireOS did it, I think fewer of those features, even though it was less extensible, it was not as easy or intuitive to deploy. So I think the intuition and how you actually construct a 9800, an entry engineer would struggle a lot more in a 9800. So I would not recommend the product if somebody did not already have a good foundation of network engineering.
Overall I could see myself recommending these to others if they have the right set of circumstances at their place of business. Those would be like ours, if they had a location that couldnt be served by a WLC. Once setup they are easy to manage and self healing as in they wont go down when one is offline.
It is good kind of design with the multiple flow profiles and also location base whereby the long very, I think the traditional controller doesn't have this, so we need to have that specific. Every day is getting the same profile but this have a little bit difference. It's very good with the site tagging and also designing all the location-based requirements.
If possible, please add a column for WAP Name and WAP Model within the 2.4/5/6 GHz radio sections, as we have different models of WAPs in the fleet, and it would be easier to identify WAPs within a building.
We conduct digital exams for our students. If there is a way to identify clients and block traffic for applications like ChatGPT, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, there is no filter for ChatGPT or generative AI.
Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution
Due to our HA set up we have always managed to access our wireless networks without problems, when issues occur. When we have lost access to the GUI, due to internal network problems, console access is always welcomed and brings with it the normal Cisco CLI syntax. From previous versions of CLI, it is now a lot simpler and reflects other Cisco products, making it easier to troubleshoot and navigate when necessary.
Monitoring is very good Seamless integration with Cisco ISE RRM configuration very easy. It has REST API support IOS-XE is very powerful operation system. Multicasting and mDNS features are really good and very easy to configure. It supports Pyats and Genie so getting constructed data from python script calls very helpful.
We are moving into a more unified and centralized design, and the benefits offered by the 9800 compared to the above listed 5520 series and 8500 series of wireless controller is much preferred. The staggered upgrade option is again another feature much improved moving to the new model and management through DNAC
Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller provides the ability to manage and deploy the wireless network from a web UI or mobile application, and without the expense or complexity of a wireless controller appliance.
I mean, return on investment is really hard to quantify. Being in a healthcare scenario, it definitely has very good uptime, very good performance. It's easy to manage, fairly trouble free with a few issues not withstanding. There's really no income based off of it, but it does allow our nurses, nursing staff, our physicians to take care of patients better and more reliably and enables a lot of communication options that we wouldn't have had we not had that controller.
