VMware removed public VDDK downloads. Your migration keeps moving.

Broadcom took the download pages down in late August without a word. The migration paths ModernOps uses run through partners Broadcom depends on.

On August 25, the public download pages for the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) started returning errors. VDDK 8, VDDK 9, the landing page, and parts of the install documentation all went dark. Broadcom has yet to announce or explain the change (the error page blames a website redesign, and customers who opened cases were told the kit is no longer available for download and were pointed at Technology Alliance Partner backup products). Existing copies keep working. Fresh copies require a current vSphere entitlement through the Broadcom support portal, or membership in the Technology Alliance Program.

VDDK is a C library. It lets software outside the hypervisor open a VMDK and read blocks out of it, and paired with Changed Block Tracking it is what makes agentless backup and agentless migration work. Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Nutanix Move, Azure Migrate, AWS Application Migration Service, and most KVM conversion tooling end their install guides the same way: go download the VDDK yourself. That download is gone, and the license blocks anyone else from hosting it.

Broadcom is making it harder to leave VMware. Stopping migrations outright would mean cutting off its largest technology partners, and those partners are the same companies protecting VMware’s installed base. Veeam and Commvault ship the VDDK inside their products under Broadcom partner agreements. Every VMware customer running Veeam or Commvault depends on that arrangement for nightly backups. Break it, and Broadcom breaks backup for the customers it is fighting to keep.

At ModernOps, our preferred migration methods run through those national vendors:

Proxmox VE’s built-in ESXi import wizard reads VMDKs directly from the ESXi host API and has no VDDK dependency either. The August change touched none of these four paths.

Those four are the paths ModernOps runs. Across the wider tooling market the fallout sorts into three groups, and one question decides the group: did the tool ever depend on a separate VDDK download? The board below tracks thirteen tools as of mid-September.

Unaffected. Commercial backup platforms ship the disk library inside their own installers under their own agreements with Broadcom, so Veeam and Commvault keep backing up vSphere and restoring straight into Proxmox VE. NetApp Shift Toolkit converts at the array layer. The Proxmox VE import wizard reads ESXi hosts over their native APIs, documented on the Proxmox VE wiki. Agent-based tools such as Zerto run inside the guest and move data without opening a VMDK from the outside.

Working around. Cloudbase, the company behind the Coriolis migration engine, reports a clean-room, open-source replacement for the VixDiskLib interface, so Coriolis keeps reading VMDKs without Broadcom’s binary. Microsoft and AWS both steer customers to their in-guest agents in place of the vCenter-side appliances: Azure Migrate’s agent-based path and the AWS Application Migration Service replication agent. Slower to roll out at scale, since every VM needs an agent, and it works today.

Affected. The third group is the one from section 01: tools whose install guides end with a VDDK tarball from Broadcom. Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit for Virtualization builds a VDDK container image from that tarball as a prerequisite for warm migrations into OpenShift Virtualization. Nutanix Move, Google Cloud’s Migrate to Virtual Machines, SUSE Harvester’s import controller and Apache CloudStack’s direct VMware-to-KVM import sit in the same position, along with any homegrown KVM pipeline built on virt-v2v and nbdkit’s VDDK plugin, whose manual sends you to VMware for the library. New deployments and upgrades stall. Existing installs that cached the binaries keep running, which is why teams mid-migration on these tools are fine and teams starting next quarter are the ones calling.

First came the rumor that Broadcom would keep vSphere Standard alive a while longer. It is more than a rumor now. Broadcom executives told reporters at VMware Explore in Las Vegas in early September that a refreshed vSphere Standard is coming, with details promised for mid-October (no version number, price, ship date, or route to market yet). vSphere Standard has been frozen on the 8.0 Update 3 branch since 2022 while vSphere 9 shipped only inside VCF and VVF, and vSphere 8 general support is expected to end in October 2027. Broadcom is trying to stop decisions already in motion.

The cat is out of the bag. Hypervisors like Proxmox VE deliver Enterprise features at a lower price point than vSphere Standard: dynamic load balancing (the DRS equivalent, shipped in Proxmox VE 9.2 in May), a per-VM firewall for microsegmentation, SDN with BGP and EVPN, HA with affinity rules, and multi-cluster management through Proxmox Datacenter Manager. New Enterprise features land in every release at no additional cost. Proxmox turns on 24/7 Enterprise support on October 19 (Premium tier at launch, Standard tier rolling on through Q4), and ModernOps layers White Glove Support on top with a 20-minute SLA and a phone number that rings an engineer. Our Proxmox VE vs vSphere Standard comparison has the per-socket pricing.

And because Proxmox VE is open source, products like MultiPortal get developed without vendor guardrails and give users a cloud-like experience on infrastructure they control.

If the headlines about VDDK support halting migrations have reached you, the short version is that your migration is fine. Your backup vendor already holds the bits. Your NetApp already holds the data. ModernOps engineers are mid-flight on a multi-site VMware exit of roughly 6,000 VMs, and the exits we scope for mid-market and SLED customers start from the tools already in the rack.