vSphere Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS)
A vSphere distributed switch (VDS) was primarily built to reduce the administrative overhead involved in maintaining the network configuration in a large environment. A very common misconception is that VDS is a single switch that spans over multiple ESXi hosts. The fact is that it is not. All it does is to offer a single management plane for all the host data planes (hidden software switches) distributed on the ESXi hosts, hence the name distributed switch:
The hidden software switch is not a standard switch per se, as it offers much greater capabilities when compared to a vSphere standard switch. The management layer resides on the vCenter server managing the ESXi hosts. Hence, the VDS can only be created/managed using the vCenter server.
The Datacenter object in the vCenter inventory is the boundary for the VDS, meaning it can span across clusters but not across the data centers (from a vCenter inventory standpoint). As with every other object...
