Broadcom removes the VMware disk tool most migration tools need

Broadcom pulled the public download pages for VMware's Virtual Disk Development Kit around August 25, with no announcement. Support told every customer who asked the same thing: the kit is "no longer available for use or download." It points them to authorized partners instead.

VDDK is the toolkit VMware built for reading and writing its virtual disks. Most of the tooling used to leave VMware sits on top of it, including Azure Migrate and Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization. Nutanix Move, Platform9's vJailbreak, virt-v2v, and nbdkit all depend on it too. Red Hat says it can't redistribute the kit, since it's Broadcom's proprietary code.

Platform9 was first to go public with it, in a post laying out which tools break and why. One exception stands out in that account: Proxmox's importer never used VDDK, so it's untouched.

Every one of these migration tools exists to help customers leave VMware, and most were built on a library only Broadcom controls. Broadcom just proved it will cut off that access without notice. Proxmox skipped VDDK from the start, a bet that now looks like foresight instead of a shortcut for a smaller player.