Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Score9.4 out of 10

148 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Wireless LAN

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers at one of our site. It supports WiFi 6 and all catalyst Access points. It supports ISSU It comes with more security features and has lot more capabilities than traditional Aironet WLC.

Pros

WiFi6
ISSU
Troubleshooting

Cons

Managing via Catalyst Centre

Return on Investment

Great Wifi experience as end user.
Minimum downtime with ISSU Upgrade

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 3504 WLAN Controller

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)

Dominic Romandi

Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at HCA (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use a dedicated pair at each hospital, with some remote anchoring to other sites within a "market" or outside if need be for guest traffic on dedicated internet circuits. The centralization and unified management interface has been fantastic, and the automated setup integration with DNAC is an added bonus.

Pros

unified management and operation interface(s)
automated setup integration with DNAC
built in troubleshooting tools to assist all levels of engineers

Cons

The biggest issues we have had have been software related. Requiring code upgrades or reloads to fix an unfixable problem.
Some of the troubleshooting utilities aren't perfectly clear as to what theyre doing or how to set them up or what to expect results wise or resource wise.
I think there is a lack of filtering in certain displays where you cannot use the "contains" option for certain device type filtering. But those options should be universal in all views.

Return on Investment

It has made management much easier
introducing new devices into our ecosystem is far simplified and saves many hours in the initial setup and troubleshooting any quirks
The anchor floating has enabled additional circuit savings.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller and Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller

Other Software Used

OneDrive, ServiceNow IT Operations Management, Atlassian Confluence

Daniel Cummins

Network Engineer II in Information Technology at The University of Kansas Health System (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's the central controller. There's actually two HA systems. So each data center has a wireless controller and about 2000 APs converged to each one, and that number's going to grow to about 3000 APs per controller and they're used in an Active-Active N+1 setup. So all of our wireless is done in central switching. We don't do any flex connect or local switching. So all wireless traffic converges to just these two boxes.

Pros

I think the updates are great. ISSU upgrading code is fantastic. I think the speed with which CAPWAP converges or reconverges, I think the redundancy mechanisms for roaming APs to other controllers is very good. I think overall, getting away from more of a monolithic processor where subprocesses handle what they call the WNCD tasks, I think fundamentally is an improvement in performance.
The radioactive tracing, all of the troubleshooting and all of the logging and all of the importing and exporting features for logging and analytics within the controller itself is really, really good compared to the predecessor AireOS.

Cons

The big one for me is tables. When you go to look at an inventory of an AP monitoring or a client monitoring, it truncates the list to only a hundred items in the view of this table, even if there's thousands or tens of thousands of entries. And so if you go to sort a column, it's only sorting the portion of the first 100 within the table view. That is a big shortcoming of the tool. Being able to filter and sort the live data as it's happening and the live traffic and interactions as it's happening is enormously helpful for a wireless engineer. Exporting that process with any kind of delay defeats the purpose of analyzing real-time issues. So being able to troubleshoot and review data at a glance is a huge lacking problem on this platform compared to its predecessor, the AireOS modern UI, or there's the classic view and the new view under the modern UI incorporated in like 8.3. It had a sortable table that let you filter and look at everything. So if I want to look at only the clients that are connected at one particular 8 0 2 11 protocol type, I can do that. If I want to sort it by data rates, I can do that. If I want to sort it by interference or SNR, I can do that on AireOS. I cannot do that on the 9800, and it is a big hurdle to being able to answer questions proficiently and quickly.

Return on Investment

It is a fair replacement for the 8540. It is mostly capable of being a one-to-one replacement, and so I would put it as a very net positive product. I don't think that there were a lot of pains in migrating from one platform to the other if again, you knew what you're doing in your design and able to make all that work predictably. And so very positive. I think overall it's been a very good solution of the one option out there. It was a very good solution.

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Infoblox DDI (BloxOne)

Gurpreet Singh

Junior Network Engineer in Information Technology at TMX Group (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

Centralized Management
High availability

Cons

GUI Performance and Usability
Slow Feature Rollout

Return on Investment

Improved network reliability
easier managemen

Alternatives Considered

Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points and Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center

Stephen Epley View profile

Information Technology Manager in Information Technology at City of Bowling Green (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers have helped us modernize our wireless infrastructure by give us additional flexability in configuration.

Pros

Management interfaces
Adaptability
Flexible

Cons

New configuration could be improved with a guided mode

Return on Investment

Network segmentation and security advances over previous hardware

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller

Other Software Used

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

FortiAP

Ubiquiti WLAN, duplic

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

What is Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers?

Categories & Use Cases

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