Stay away from VTP?

[Sam Sanders]

I am new to VLANs and trunks. I had a conversation with an "expert" who told me that "no one uses VTP" and that if a switch gets replaced, that "it could take the whole network down". That seems absurd to me. Seems like if I had to replace a switch - even if it was the primary VTP server then I can promote the secondary server to the primary.  We have a total of 12 switches. I was going to set up 2 VLANs and trunk ports for ESXi hosts in a VSA cluster.  So I am trying to decide whether or not to use VTP.  Am I better off staying away from VTP?

[Defututus]

VTP (especially version 3) is a great protocol and it can save a lot of time as it is very boring to define a new VLAN on all switches which matter. You save time when defining RSPAN etc. BUT!!! beside of all which was said be careful which switches you have in your network. E.g. I have a bad experience when I had Catalyst 2960-L supporting 64 VLAN only. When I defined 65th VLAN that switch just crashed (normally it should be automatically switched to the transparent mode and it should continue forwarding traffic using current VLAN database in the transparent mode). I also experienced problem with the updating of the VLAN database when using VTP ver3 between XE and IOS 12.55.something)