Broadcom pulls VMware VDDK downloads, disrupting tools used to migrate off vSphere

What happened

Broadcom has quietly taken down the public download pages for VMware's Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK), according to a report from virtualizationhowto.com that reached the front page of Hacker News. The old URLs now return 404 errors, and Broadcom has published no announcement, deprecation notice, or named replacement explaining the change.

The clearest indication that this is intentional comes from support cases. In Reddit discussions cited by virtualizationhowto.com, administrators report that Broadcom Customer Care told them the VDDK is "no longer available for use or download" and steered them toward backup and recovery products from authorized Broadcom Technology Alliance Partners instead.

Why a developer library matters this much

Most administrators never download the VDDK directly, which makes it easy to underestimate the impact. The kit is the library third-party software uses to read and write VMware's virtual disk formats, and it sits underneath a long list of tools that customers rely on to move or protect workloads. virtualizationhowto.com notes that it is used by Microsoft's Azure Migrate, Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Nutanix Move, the open-source virt-v2v and nbdkit projects, and various VMware-to-KVM migration products.

That means the people hit hardest are precisely the ones trying to leave: the library is central to moving workloads off vSphere onto other platforms.

Vendors are already adjusting

Platform vendors have begun documenting the problem and rewriting their guidance.

ShapeBlue recorded the change on August 25, 2026, after the VDDK links referenced by its VMware-to-KVM migration workflow started failing. The company tested multiple URL patterns, including version-specific paths for VDDK 8 and 9, and found all of them unavailable.

Microsoft has updated its Azure Migrate documentation. Where its instructions previously told administrators to install the VDDK on the Azure Migrate appliance for agentless VMware migrations, they now carry a warning that Broadcom may restrict access to the kit, with agent-based migration offered as the fallback.

Red Hat published a support article on August 27, 2026, acknowledging that Migration Toolkit for Virtualization customers may hit "not found" or "access denied" errors when fetching the VDDK. Because the software is proprietary to Broadcom, Red Hat says it cannot host or redistribute the package itself, and is advising customers to contact Broadcom support to request access. Red Hat engineering is also exploring longer-term alternatives, such as storage copy offload, though that approach depends on what the underlying storage vendor supports.

Nutanix customers are affected as well. A user on the Nutanix community forums reported getting a 404 from the VDDK link even while logged into a Broadcom account, while preparing an ESXi-to-AHV migration with Nutanix Move.

Why it matters

Whether or not the removal turns out to be permanent, the practical effect is that leaving vSphere just became harder for many enterprises. The library that migration tooling depends on is now gated behind a support request, with no public explanation of the criteria Broadcom will use to grant access.

The timing is significant. A large number of VMware customers have been evaluating exit paths following Broadcom's takeover, and migration tooling is the machinery that makes those exits feasible. Removing a dependency shared by Azure Migrate, Red Hat's toolkit and Nutanix Move raises the cost and friction of all of those projects at once, which is why observers are reading the move as lock-in rather than housekeeping.

It also sets an uncomfortable precedent for the backup ecosystem. The VDDK is not only used to migrate workloads; it is a common component in data protection products. If access is being narrowed to authorized partners, independent tool vendors may face the same wall next.

For teams caught mid-migration, the immediate guidance from vendors is to open a case with Broadcom and request access, or fall back to agent-based methods where they exist. Longer term, expect Red Hat and others to engineer the dependency out of their products entirely — a process that will take time, and that leaves customers stuck between a 404 page and a support queue in the interim.