The zyxel Nebula cloud manage AP other than managed by cloud, I know I can use SNMP to manage it as well. Unifi gives you the flexibility of having a local controller, your own centralized controller, or a couple different vendor provided cloud options. The other way of looking at that is that the Meraki devices (and I suspect the other "zero touch" products) are locked to the one vendor provided cloud service. So the architecture is not as scalible as other cloud soltion are born for cloud. Ubiquiti's solution is like they create an instance to run the Unifi controller in the data center, everything else is the same. The AP will call home, their cloud, and it works like mutitanat. Noteasy wrote:The other cloud solutions, CISCO Meraki, Aerohive, or the low cost Zyxel Nebula are all have the zero-touch deployment. We're much more into the Red Hat/CentOS world so managing Ubuntu/Debian feels odd to me, so I'd still like the "Download the OVA and call it a day" of a virtual appliance. I suspect that as we move ahead with deploying Unifi in the other plants, I'll end up building a VM to manage all the locations. Although there is the usual "It's in the Cloud!!" argument that they handle all the maintenance.
Unless the Cloud Key auto-adopts APs on the LAN, it's probably faster to SSH in and sent a simple inform code as well. So we were starting from scratch, with a ton of things on the agenda to get done, so that made the appliance approach particularly attractive. We installed the Unifi gear in a facility we acquired last year as a test case.
We've historically used Cisco APs with 5508 controllers for WiFi in our plants. I already have dozens of sites up and running already, so for us the technical debt has been spent. Units come in, we adopt and test them, then deploy as needed by dropping them into whatever site they belong to. I can see appliance-based installs being pretty attractive, but maybe it just works better for me at an MSP to have a controller already built. Any OS or controller version updates just get the same quick snapshot I'd do to a file server VM. Unless the Cloud Key auto-adopts APs on the LAN, it's probably faster to SSH in and sent a simple inform code as well.īasically seems to me like I host a virtual version of (or whatever the address is.) already? Took me all of 15 minutes to spin up an Ubuntu VM for testing the other day and have the Unifi controller installed on it.
They're going to be releasing a Unifi server that sounds like a hardware appliance, I think a virtual appliance would actually fit better in many "enterprise" environments than a physical machine. Basically the Cloud Key, but easy to scale up on your virtual infrastructure. The thing I'd really like to see is for them to release a virtual appliance version of the controller. Yeah, I can do all of that, but if I don't have to, it's a win for me. The updates are also packaged so I don't need to worry about OS updates breaking the controller.
I don't need to spin up a VM, install the controller, etc. Take it out of the box, power it on, and you can be managing the Unifi stuff in a few minutes. The thing I like about the Cloud Key is that it's an appliance. What's the advantage to a cloud key when it's a fairly simple and straightforward process to spin up your own hosted controller?