// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Broadcom Kills Public VDDK Access to Tighten its Grip on VMware
Broadcom has taken down the public download pages for the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). The pages for VDDK 8 and 9, along with the landing page, now return a generic error message.
So far, there has been no formal announcement from Broadcom.
The removal was carried out sometime last month, as people on Reddit and vendor forums started reporting dead links in mid-August. ShapeBlue, an Apache CloudStack services firm, documented the change on August 25. Red Hat followed days later with a support note for its Migration Toolkit for Virtualization.
While existing copies will still be functional, meaning implementations that currently use VDDK will continue working as usual, those who want fresh copies are out of luck.
The VDDK is a library that lets backup and migration tools read VMware virtual disks from outside the hypervisor. VMware launched it in 2008 as an easily accessible SDK for customers building disk utilities, and it soon became the backbone of image-level backups and agentless migrations.
Unfortunately, its license makes things complicated. The library cannot be redistributed, so no Linux distribution provides it, and no open source project can bundle it for users. Everyone has to point to Broadcom's download page, and that page is now gone.
Convenient, not for users but for VMware's owner, Broadcom, who has managed to cut off public access to a tool many relied on to move away from the platform.
Microsoft's Azure Migrate documentation is one example of the disarray caused by the silence. It tells admins to download VDDK 8.0 or 9.0 from the Broadcom portal for agentless migration, and the links embedded there point to a page that isn't accessible.
The docs suggest falling back to agent-based migration if VDDK is unreachable.
Red Hat is in the same boat. Its support note reports customers hitting "not found" or "access denied" errors while trying to access the public download links for VDDK, further noting that it cannot host or redistribute the kit.