vDS - Single VS Mulitple

[BostonTechGuy]

Question for everyone:

Should we have a single vDS per vCenter or multiple vDS per vCenter.  My client has multiple clusters of different ESXi OS (5.0.x and 5.5).  We are migrating off all the old 5.0 Hosts then retiring them.  In the process we are going to retire all the 5.0 vCenters.  What we are not touching are the VMs themselves.  They are just moving.

Several members of the team has recommended that we create a new vDS on the 5.5 vCenters to isolate the migrated VMs.  I see zero benefit to this plan.  Asking for thoughts.  A single vDS for all the clusters in that vCenter should be perfectly fine correct?  I was going to have all the Port Groups from the old vDS recreated in the vDS on the 5.5 vCenters. Hardware physical ports is a non-issue here.  We have plenty of ports to support different switches.  Again.. I just cant see the reason for multiple vDS.

Thanks,
Boston Tech Guy

[BenLiebowitz]

The one problem with migrating between clusters with multiple vDS switches makes things more complicated.  The Portgroup name gets the vDS name embedded in it, so migrating between clusters becomes more complicated... 

In our 4.1 environment we had the Nexus 1000v in one cluster and a basic vDS in the other... We had to remove the VM from inventory in cluster1 and browse/re-add it in cluster2. This brought the NIC up with an invalid backing and we were able to choose the new portgroup in the vDS.  Migrating via the GUI gave an error that we couldn't avoid.

However, in my QA cluster, we have eight 1gb uplinks and we have 3 different vDS switches in that vCenter, one for vMotion, one for NFS and one for VMNetwork traffic. 

YMMV.

[BostonTechGuy]

Excellent point about switching between clusters.  This will be a factor in our new design.  Will bring that point to the table.

Thanks!

BTG.