Broadcom pulls VDDK downloads, breaking VMware exit tools

Broadcom pulled the public download pages for the Virtual Disk Development Kit around August 25, with no announcement. Customers who went looking got a message from support instead: the kit is "no longer available for use or download," and anyone who needs it should go through an authorized Technology Alliance Partner.

That's a bigger deal than it sounds, because VDDK isn't some optional add-on. It's the library that lets you read a VMware virtual disk from outside VMware, and most of the tooling built to help people leave VMware runs on top of it. Microsoft Azure Migrate uses it. So does Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Nutanix Move, Platform9's vJailbreak, and the virt-v2v/nbdkit stack. Platform9 confirmed the restriction publicly on September 1. Red Hat says it can't redistribute the proprietary blob itself and is now looking for a way around it, per VirtualizationHowto's report, which draws on Platform9 and Red Hat's own MTV documentation.

The one migration path this doesn't touch is Proxmox's built-in importer, and that's not luck. Proxmox never used VDDK to begin with, so it has nothing to lose when Broadcom decides who gets the library and who doesn't.

Every migration tool built on VDDK depends on the company you're leaving to keep granting it access. A tool that talks to VMware disks without asking VMware's owner for a key carries no such risk. The report doesn't say whether Microsoft or Nutanix have partner agreements that keep their tools running, or whether this is temporary while Broadcom sorts out its partner program. Migration projects that assume any of these tools will still work in three months should confirm that first.