Aruba has rolled out a new licensing system for Central, its cloud networking platform – and it’s much simpler to manage than before. Aruba have aligned the licence type to devices being managed and streamlined the services offered into two licence types: Foundation and Advanced.

If you’re unfamiliar with Aruba Central, know that it offers a single source of truth and control for every device, office, and network instance that your organisation deploys. With the help of AI and its microservices architecture, Aruba Central can help organisations of all sizes achieve greater productivity, significant operational IT cost savings, and greater resilience for digital services – all increasingly valuable as purchasing and working behaviours continue their great migration online. Find out more about Aruba Central on Aruba’s website or check out our series of useful how-to video guides.

If you’re an existing Aruba customer, here’s what the new licensing system means for you.
TLDR; watch the video below instead to help you learn about transitioning to the new Aruba Central licenses.

Easier than eating in?

After the events of the past year, most of us have grown increasingly familiar with ordering food to our homes – a convenience and service that we should all be thankful for. What can get confusing, though, is delivery fees for those meals – calculated based on time of day, distance, and various other factors that seem to change every time we order. Necessary as they are for our F&B operators’ margins, delivery fees add an extra layer of complexity to an otherwise straightforward process.

The same could be said of Aruba Central’s legacy licensing system, where IT managers would need to buy a device management token for each of their devices under Aruba Central’s control. You’d then need to purchase a service token for each device that would allow you to apply one or more services to that specific device. Managing two types of tokens is, of course, more complicated than looking after just one – and potentially risky if you forgot to renew either type of token.

That’s no longer the case with Aruba Central’s new licensing system. Now, each device on the network requires only one license that governs both access and all services. Network managers can choose between either a Foundation or an Advanced licence for each of their devices, based on what they need:

  • Foundation licences cover a range of commonly used services including AI and analytics; orchestration; content filtering; provisioning; and 24/7 TAC support. Most Aruba customers can get the job done with Foundation licences alone.
  • Advanced licences offer advanced segmentation; enhanced AI and analytics; Unified Comms and Collaboration visibility; and advanced support. These cater to more sophisticated use-cases, typically for larger enterprises requiring particularly high levels of resiliency or automation across mission-critical infrastructures.

For those looking for additional support, there’s also the Hardware-Only Foundational Care add-on – offering Next Business Day or 4-Hour parts support for hardware issues. It’s a more cost-efficient way of handling hardware replacements than traditional models where hardware and software need to be replaced in one.

One licence per device means no more confusion around what services different parts of your network can access, or unexpected add-on expenses on top of your initial device licences. That’s easier than calculating the delivery fee from your local sushi bar to your doorstep – and the difference in fees between ordering at 5pm versus 6pm.

A five-step recipe to transition your licences

If you’re already using Aruba Central for your networks, any device management tokens that you’re currently using should have already been upgraded to Foundation licences.

Unused tokens can be upgraded by logging into Aruba Central and following the recipe below:

  1. Click on “Account Home” and click on the “Key Management” tile.
  2. Select “Convert DMs to new licence types” in the top right.
  3. Select your licence keys, click on “Convert”
  4. Specify how many of each type of licence you’d like to provision. These are based on the type and family of device being used (AP, Gateway, Switch). You will need to allocate all of the licences before you are able to convert them.
  5. Navigate back to your Key Management view, and you’ll see the new licences ready and available for use.

Note that by 31 December 2021, all unused tokens will be converted to AP Foundation licences – but you’ll still be able to change these into other types of licences after this happens.

Streamlining and optimising your network with Aruba Central is even easier than ever before – perhaps even more so than ordering actual takeaway. For more details on how to get the most out of Aruba Central’s new licensing system, or to find out more about how Aruba Central could maximise the potential of your network, get in touch with us today.

The Author

Darko Raic

Darko Raic is an Aruba Business Partner Solutions Architect (BPSA) providing technical pre-sales support to Dicker Data resellers for Aruba solutions. With over 15 years’ experience in the industry, Darko offers deep technical expertise in wired and wireless networking solutions. He also shares his knowledge with Dicker Data resellers through regular training and enablement sessions via the Phoenix Pro Club program.