Are variable speed drives harmful to motor?

Variable speed drive switches very fast which brings high dv/dt on motor. How often do we face with problems coming with VSD? How harmful is the common mode currents in windings and other parts of motor due to high dv/dt. Do we see winding isolation failure? How much does the life of motor reduce? Also, is the filtering of voltage at the output of inverter common or applicable practice in the field?

The waveforms for the INVERTER are not good to the motor.... Makes the motor run hot and less efficient..... and all the above....
In-line filters to reduce harmonics is a must in many cases...
Depending on power levels you can have in line reactors for CM and DM or balanced bridge methods for CM... There is methods of harmonic canceling with reactors called harmonic blockers, where you arrange the 3 phase windings in such a manner to cancel certain harmonics....not all harmonics will be blocked, usually in grouping intervals...you need to be aware of what harmonics are your worst offenders...

Mostly in medium and high voltage motor drives the very fast change of the voltage can induce high capacitive currents inside the motor with harmful results.
A way to reduce this negative effect is to increase the number of voltage steps (levels) such that the dV/dT will decrease proportionally (dT=turn on switching time, dV=one voltage step). The most popular method used is SVPWM (space vector sine PWM) NPC (neutral point clamped) multilevel frequency converter. Line L-C filters are also used for EMC.

The first step in any filter analysis is knowing what harmonic vectors your dealing with.
Mathcad is a great tool for modeling the PWM modulation with the sub carrier and generating the harmonic matrices..vectors...I usually go above the 100th harmonic in some analysis, then doing this over the operating ranges of the motor....you then pick your Worse Case operating point and now you have a matrices to work with.... Summing the harmonic magnitudes will give you an idea of how much garbage your feeding your motor windings.

They could be harmful for high frequency current and voltages which are not economical to be eliminated.
But this weakness is so neglect able to the benefits providing. These benefits are very comprehensive. The harmful harmonics are controlled by the standards, so in order to improve harmonic characteristics, we need an improved standard.