Cybersecurity & Digital Sovereignty · 8 September 2026
No Longer Available for Use or Download
Broadcom pulled public access to the VMware library nearly every exit route off vSphere depends on, without a word of explanation, the same fortnight it revived a free Standard edition.
By Alan Wright · The Haunted Lighthouse Limited · Peel, Isle of Man
Broadcom has spent the last two years insisting, in its own quiet way, that leaving VMware was entirely the customer's prerogative; never a technical obstacle course the vendor itself had a hand in. That framing got harder to sustain sometime before 25 August, when the public download pages for VMware's Virtual Disk Development Kit went dark.
No dispute about the fact of it. What's less settled is what it means, and the trail left behind by four separate vendors scrambling to route around it tells a fairly consistent story.
What happened
No deprecation notice, no migration guidance, no Broadcom announcement of any kind has surfaced from anyone who's gone looking. Follow the old VDDK link today and you get a 404.
ShapeBlue found it first, while testing the VDDK links referenced in their own VMware-to-KVM migration documentation. They checked version-specific paths for VDDK 8 and 9; both were gone. They published on 25 August.
What moves this from broken link to policy decision is what customers say Broadcom told them directly. Support tickets reported on Reddit's r/sysadmin quote Broadcom Customer Care stating the VDDK is "no longer available for use or download," and pointing affected customers instead toward Broadcom's Technology Alliance Program partners for backup and recovery tooling. A related thread on r/vmware, with users reporting the same experience, was subsequently removed by the subreddit's moderators.
Why this particular library
VDDK isn't an obscure developer package most customers would ever touch directly. It's the plumbing underneath nearly every agentless migration path off VMware: Microsoft's Azure Migrate appliance, Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Nutanix Move, and open tooling like virt-v2v and nbdkit. Pull it, and the primary documented exit route for at least four separate platforms gets harder to execute, in a single move, without Broadcom touching any of those vendors' products directly.
The corroborating trail
None of this rests on one source.
Microsoft has updated its own Azure Migrate documentation to warn that Broadcom may restrict VDDK access, and now directs admins toward agent-based migration as the fallback when the agentless appliance route fails.
Red Hat published a support KB on 27 August confirming the identical "not found" or "access denied" pattern for Migration Toolkit for Virtualization customers. Red Hat notes it cannot host or redistribute Broadcom's proprietary software itself and is directing customers back to Broadcom support, while its own engineering team investigates workarounds such as storage copy offload.
Nutanix Move customers report the same 404, even while logged into a valid Broadcom account, according to threads on Nutanix's community forum. One customer says Broadcom support told them VDDK access had moved inside the Technology Alliance Program and now requires that specific commercial relationship.
Platform9, whose vJailbreak project exists specifically to migrate workloads off VMware, called it out directly on 1 September, confirming its standard VDDK-plus-NBD migration path is now broken for anyone who doesn't already hold the files locally.
Theatre Pulldown
The institutional claim is never stated outright, because it doesn't need to be: Broadcom's public messaging around VMware Cloud Foundation and the platform roadmap has consistently framed migration as the customer's prerogative, not something the vendor stands in the way of.
The operational reality is that the specific library nearly every serious agentless migration tool depends on to leave was pulled from public access with no notice, in the same fortnight Broadcom revived a free vSphere Standard edition at VMware World; an edition aimed squarely at slowing the SMB and mid-tier customer bleed the company has been absorbing since the post-acquisition licensing changes.
Worth sitting with the asymmetry: none of Broadcom's own products need the public VDDK download to keep a customer running vSphere. Only the tools pointed at the exit do.
What isn't confirmed
No Broadcom announcement exists explaining the change, so motive is inference here, not established fact. Everything documented above is effect, not stated intent, and that distinction stays explicit rather than getting flattened into "Broadcom did this on purpose to trap customers," however tempting the framing.
The Technology Alliance Program gating explanation comes from a single reported support interaction, not a Broadcom public statement or policy page. Treat it as reported, not confirmed.
It's also worth stating plainly what this story is not: VMware-to-Proxmox migrations using Proxmox's own built-in import utility are unaffected, since that path never depended on VDDK in the first place. This is a lock-in story about tooling built on Broadcom's proprietary library, not a blanket migration blackout.
What to watch
Anyone with a live VMware exit already underway should confirm today whether their chosen migration tool depends on VDDK, and if so, whether a working copy is already in hand. The Broadcom support ticket route is reportedly the only remaining channel, and nothing about it is guaranteed.
Red Hat's storage-copy-offload workaround and Platform9's proxy-VM alternative both point at the same underlying response: third-party vendors are already building around Broadcom's proprietary layer rather than waiting on it, which is its own signal about how much trust remains in that relationship.
Watch for an actual Broadcom statement. Its absence, more than a fortnight after the removal was first documented, is doing quite a lot of the talking on its own.
Sources
Brandon Lee, "Leaving VMware Just Got Harder After Broadcom Pulled VDDK Downloads," Virtualization Howto, 7 September 2026 – virtualizationhowto.com
ShapeBlue, "Broadcom Removes VDDK Pages Without Explanation: What You Need to Know," 25 August 2026 – shapeblue.com
Red Hat, "Unable to download VMware VDDK images for Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV)," 27 August 2026 – access.redhat.com
Microsoft, "Set up an Azure Migrate appliance for server assessment in a VMware environment" – learn.microsoft.com
Platform9, "Broadcom Cut Public Access of Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) Overnight," 1 September 2026 – platform9.com
The Sovereign Auditor covers digital sovereignty, cybersecurity governance, and data protection policy, with particular focus on Isle of Man jurisdiction and Crown Dependency issues.
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