Broadcom took the download pages down in late August without a word. The migration paths ModernOps uses run through partners Broadcom depends on.
What changed
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.
Why this is a speed bump
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:
Back up the VMware VM, restore it as a Proxmox VE VM. The VDDK ships with the product, and it is the same tool already protecting the workload.
Veeam works the same way: back up from vSphere, restore into Proxmox VE, which Veeam has supported as a platform since Backup & Replication 12.2.
Shift converts the VMDK to qcow2 in place on the ONTAP volume using FlexClone. The conversion takes minutes per VM regardless of size, copies zero data, and the VDDK never enters the picture because the work happens at the storage layer.
Proxmox’s built-in ESXi import wizard reads VMDKs directly from the ESXi host API and never depended on the VDDK either. The August change touched none of these four paths.
The vSphere Standard rumor
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 have you worried
If you’re reading the headlines about VDDK support halting your migration, fear not. 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.
The VMware Exit Strategy is a 45-minute working session on Wednesday, October 7 at 11:00 AM ET: how the options compare (staying on VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Scale Computing, Proxmox VE, StorMagic for small edge sites), what an exit requires, and what ModernOps chose for its own IaaS and why. Register here.