I’ve started playing with Aruba Central and AOS10 to check out how our Vocera badges function on it and to learn a little more about it so I can assist our customers when they need it. In general our badges have a very good voice experience on Aruba WLAN’s and I’ve been impressed with how smooth the audio is when roaming compared to some other WLAN vendors. But when it comes to Aruba Central I only seem to hear negative opinions about how hard it is to use.
Personally I had a very impressive experience with Aruba Central (with AOS8) when I had to rely heavily on it for an upgrade project during my brief employment at HPE in 2020. But I was only using a very small and particular piece of Central to rinse-and-repeat a multi-store upgrade. Yesterday when trying to configure something pretty fundamental to Wi-Fi, Channel Widths, I think I experienced the frustration others have with the interface, and no amount of Googling could find the answer in HPE Aruba’s documentation or anyone else’s. So here I am writing it up hoping this saves someone else the hour I spent searching, clicking and sighing.
I looked every where I could think of. I clicked and reclicked on all the places I could think of to make this change in an AOS10 AP group but I just could not find the channel width setting. This led me to conclude that it was not a UI setting and I was going to have to do some config override to achieve it which is not scalable, practical or desireable. Long story short, it turns out that the channel width options for AOS10 AP groups are located/hidden within the allowed channel list option.
Now I think about this, it makes a lot of sense, and I wonder why I didn’t click there in the couple of hours I spent thrashing around in Central looking for it. And this here I think is the crux of the Central UI negativity. The developers have come up with what they think is a logical way to handle this setting, and in fairness I can’t really argue with it, but the implementation of it just isn’t quite right to the point that a Wi-Fi professional with 2 decades of experience and a CWNE did not think to click on the channel list. So something is wrong with the implementation that puts the users off no matter how clever and logical it seems on the R&D story board.
In my defense, the interface makes no suggestion at all that the allowed channel list controls anything except the allowed channels…
So, here are the instructions for changing the channel width in both AOS8 and AOS10 AP groups (because it differs) in the hope it saves someone else some time and frustration.
AOS10
In the Aruba Central console follow these steps.
1. Choose an AOS10 AP group (I think they’re just called Groups now but meh). Note: my group is named AOS10 by me, it won’t tell you in the group name what type it is like you see in my screenshot, you’ll just have to know which of your groups are set to AOS10 level.
2. Go to Devices
3. Go into Config mode
4. Click on the Radio tab
5. Click the edit pencil next to Radio Profile you want to apply the setting to. Note: channel width is a Layer 1 RF parameter, not a Layer 2 SSID/WLAN parameter. So an AP can only use 1 channel width per radio, you can’t have different SSID’s using different channel widths. This is why the setting is under Radio and not WLANs.
6. Click the channel list for the frequency/band you want to set a channel width on
7. Now you will see the following screens depending on which band you choose. Select if you support 40MHz channels (2.4GHz) or the Minimum and Maximum channel width you want to support (5GHz/6GHz).
2.4GHz
5GHz
6GHz
AOS8
In the Aruba Central console follow these steps.
1. Choose an AOS8 AP group. Note: my group is named AOS8 by me, it won’t tell you in the group name what type it is like you see in my screenshot, you’ll just have to know which of your groups are set to AOS8 level.
2. Go to Devices
3. Go into Config mode
4. Click on the Radio tab
5. Expand the Access Point Control settings
6. You’ll now see the setting that control Channel Width and can change them as you require
I’ve not actually tested it but I presume the settings work this way (…perhaps a dangerous thing to do with Aruba Central?)
- ‘Wide channel bands’ enables 40MHz in the 2.4, 5 and 6GHz band separately (40MHz is the widest channel supported in 2.4GHz)
- ’80 MHz support’ enables 80MHz channel widths in both 5 and 6GHz
- ‘160 MHz support’ enables 160MHz channel widths in both 5 and 6GHz
So those are the instructions as they are today. Aruba Central is a cloud based interface so Aruba can change it without asking your permission or needing you to install any new code, so these instructions might get out of date. But hopefully it’ll save someone some time and frustration, and maybe I’ll make it to #1 in Googles list because this was not a well served topic previously!
Enjoy!
P.S. Wide channels are bad, stick with 20MHz always 😈