About Aruba Central (on-premises)

Aruba Central (on-premises) is a variant of Aruba Central, a SAAS platform that offers you a single intelligent console to monitor, analyze, and configure WLANWireless Local Area Network. WLAN is a 802.11 standards-based LAN that the users access through a wireless connection. and wired networks. Aruba Central makes it easy and efficient to manage your networks by combining industry-leading functionality with an intuitive user interface, and enables network administrators and help desk staff to support and control even the largest networks.

Network Operations is one of the apps in Aruba Central that helps you to manage, maintain, and analyze your network.

Key Features

Aruba Central offers the following key features and benefits:

• Streamlined configuration and deployment of devices—Leverages the ZTPZero Touch Provisioning. ZTP is a device provisioning mechanism that allows automatic and quick provisioning of devices with a minimal or at times no manual intervention. capability of Aruba devices to bring up your network in no time. Aruba Central supports group configuration of devices, which allows you to provision and manage multiple devices at once, with less administrative overhead.
• Integrated wired and wireless Infrastructure management—Offers a centralized management interface for managing wireless and wired networks in distributed environments.
• Advanced analytics and assurance—With continuous monitoring, AI-based analytics like NI-Lite provide real-time visibility and insight into what’s happening in the Wi-FiWi-Fi is a technology that allows electronic devices to connect to a WLAN network, mainly using the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radio bands. Wi-Fi can apply to products that use any 802.11 standard. network. The NI-Lite utilizes machine learning that leverage a growing pool of network data and deep domain experience.
• Health and usage monitoring—Provides a comprehensive view of your network, device status and health, and application usage. You can monitor, identify, and address issues by using data-driven dashboards, alerts, reports, and troubleshooting workflows. Aruba Central also utilizes the DPIDeep Packet Inspection. DPI is an advanced method of network packet filtering that is used for inspecting data packets exchanged between the devices and systems over a network. DPI functions at the Application layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model and enables users to identify, categorize, track, reroute, or stop packets passing through a network. feature of the devices to monitor, analyze, and block traffic based on application categories, application type, web categories, and website reputation. Using this data, you can prioritize business critical applications, limit the use of inappropriate content, and enforce access policies on a per user, device, or location basis.
• Rogue AP detection and classification—Supports rogue detection and classification. The network administrators can view the intrusion events and unauthorized or rogue devices detected in their WLAN network, and take appropriate measure to secure their networks.
• Value Added Services—Supports value added service such as Unified Communications.
  • The Unified Communication application actively monitors and provides visibility into Lync/Skype for Business traffic and allows you to prioritize sessions.

Scaling Devices for Aruba Central

Aruba Central supports switches, controllers, Instant APs, and Campus APsCampus APs are used in private networks where APs connect over private links (LAN, WLAN, WAN or MPLS) and terminate directly on controllers. Campus APs are deployed as part of the indoor campus solution in enterprise office buildings, warehouses, hospitals, universities, and so on.. Aruba Central can be implemented on multiple nodes. Accordingly, the number of supported devices increase.

The following table shows the number of devices that Aruba Central supports across multiple nodes.

Table 1: Maximum Number of Supported Devices

Nodes	Maximum Number of Supported Devices	Modes
Single Node	1000	1000 APs where APs can be either Instant APs, Campus APs, or controllers that manage APs; or a mixed deployment of any of these devices. 500 switches where switches can be AOS-S switches or CX switches or a mix of the two. In a mixed mode of switches and APs, up to 800 APs and 200 switches are supported.
Three Node	8000	8000 APs, where APs can be either Instant APs, Campus APs, or APs along with the controllers that manage APs; or a mix of any of these devices. 3000 AOS-Switches can be deployed in switch only deployment. In a mixed mode of switches and APs, up to 6000 APs (IAPs or Campus APs) and 2000 switches (AOSSwitch or AOS-CX) are supported.
Five Node	16000	16,000 Campus APs along with the controllers that manage APs can be deployed. In a mixed mode of switches and APs, up to 10,000 Campus APs and 4000 (AOS-Switch or AOS-CX) switches are supported. NOTE: IAP and AOS-CX only scale is yet to be ascertained and will be documented in future release.
Seven Node	25000	25,000 Campus APs along with the controllers that manage APs can be deployed. 10,000 AOS-Switches can be deployed in switch only deployment. In a mixed mode of switches and APs, up to 16,000 APs (IAP or Campus APs) and 7000 AOS-Switches are supported.

You can check maximum number of supported devices of the Aruba Central setup in the Account Home > Global Settings > Subscription Assignment page.

If the device limit is exceeded, the device added to the system is displayed as Unsubscribed in the Account Home > Global Settings > Device Inventory page.

Supported Web Browsers

Aruba recommends that you use the following browsers to access the Aruba Central application.

Browser Versions	Operating System
Google Chrome 39.0.2171.65 or later	Windows
Mozilla FireFox 34.0.5 or later	Windows
Internet Explorer 11	Windows
Internet Explorer 10	Windows