Wired Intelligent Edge

We have a University with an installed base of switches and EXTREME wifi but they are looking at ARUBA to add some access switches (6200) and two Core switches (8100).
They have doubts about the interoperability of the existing with the new.
We have some documentation that talks about this.

Regards

In general, switches and access points follow ethernet standards and like you don't worry if you connect a laptop or printer to a switch, you probably shouldn't really worry about changing your access switches and core. Where interoperability issues may arise is when you configured vendor specific protocols on your old equipment, like for routing, but in most cases that can be worked around easily. One thing that shows up occasionally and then is with older devices that run on 10Mbps, and some modern switches don't support that. But interoperability issues are quite rare in my experience.

And, if there were a lot of interoperability issues, you would see many questions in the Airheads community or other forum platforms.

Your Aruba partner can assist you with a proper design and migration strategy.

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Herman Robers
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If you have urgent issues, always contact your Aruba partner, distributor, or Aruba TAC Support. Check https://www.arubanetworks.com/support-services/contact-support/ for how to contact Aruba TAC. Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.

In case your problem is solved, please invest the time to post a follow-up with the information on how you solved it. Others can benefit from that.
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We have a University with an installed base of switches and EXTREME wifi but they are looking at ARUBA to add some access switches (6200) and two Core switches (8100).They have doubts about the interoperability of the existing with the new.We have some documentation that talks about this.

Regards

Just replaced the edge Extreme C5 switches with Aruba 6200F.

These new Aruba switches are pretty quiet compared to the C5s. To the point where some techs are having trouble finding the stacks because they used to depend on the noise. 

The only snag I caught early on was that the native VLAN on the Extreme side was tagged. (Not sure if this was default or configured on purpose)

I am currently migrating our Extreme S180 core to an Aruba 8325 VSX pair and that is going well so far.

Just ordered Aruba 8100s to replace my distribution switches which are currently Extreme SSAs.

Any other small issues I have run in to have been solved pretty easily with the ability to do mirroring to CPU and upload PCAPs on the 6200Fs. Love that feature so far.

Some of my edge locations are Lags and I found LACP to work well between the vendors.

We are monitoring the switches with SolarWinds Orion currently and I do see a ton of receive errors/discards on the Extreme distribution ports connecting to the edge and I have been trying to sort that out but it has not caused issues at all. TOR (Extreme 7100s) will be replaced next year and then we will be all HP/Aruba.

Steve Short

We have a University with an installed base of switches and EXTREME wifi but they are looking at ARUBA to add some access switches (6200) and two Core switches (8100).They have doubts about the interoperability of the existing with the new.We have some documentation that talks about this.

Regards