vSphere vNetwork

I just finished woking at a vSphere project for a customer site. I tried working by the book when I created the vCenter instance as a VM according to VMware best practices. I also configured vDS with the binding requirement for the vCenter VLAN.

But I was really wondering would it really save the admin effort and time for both me and the customer to configure hosts with vDS if compared to vSS and host profiles? I personally think the latter saves more time and effort, specially when dealing with vCenter VMs, unless of course vCloud Director is a future objective for the customer.

What do you thinks guys? are there reasons to favor vDS that I might be missing here?

In addition to everything you might be aware of, the great thing about vDS is when you vMotion a VM from a host to another, you don't loose the network statistics for that VM.

Hi,

You miss Network I/O control in vSS.

Storage I/O control, Network I/O control are most critical things for performance fine tuning.

You can't apply a host profile without taking down a host.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to have to bring every host offline every time I add a VLAN (which is a lot).

There is also some other features not available on the ordinary vSwitch like LLDP, Netflow, Port Mirroring, Private VLAN, being able to disconnect a single port, bandwidth shaping in both directions, a load based NIC teaming policy, graphical GUI for CDP, the option to carry specific VLAN tags up to a guest VM and more.

Thanks guys.

It seams like vDS is really hard to overlook.