Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads. Your VMware exit got harder

The Virtual Disk Development Kit is the library that lets software outside the hypervisor read a VMware virtual disk. It is the plumbing under most VM backup and most VMware-to-anything-else migration. As of late August 2026, the public download pages for it return 404, and Broadcom has said nothing.

What actually happened

ShapeBlue reported that on August 25, 2026 the VDDK URLs on Broadcom's developer portal stopped resolving — the SDK landing page, the version-specific pages for 8.0 and 9.0, and the installation documentation. Platform9 documented the same disappearance independently.

Be precise about what is and is not established here. There is no Broadcom announcement withdrawing public access, no deprecation notice, and no statement that VDDK has been discontinued. ShapeBlue also notes this is not the first outage: release notes vanished for five months in 2024, download buttons returned JSON errors in September 2024, and 8.x downloads broke in November 2025. So "quietly restricted" and "broken again" are both live explanations, and we are not going to pick one for you.

What is not ambiguous is who depends on it. virt-v2v, the open-source engine behind most VMware-to-KVM conversions, needs VDDK for its fast path. Apache CloudStack uses it for its optimized migration route. Commercial backup and migration vendors ship it only if they hold a signed redistribution agreement — which means a vendor without one cannot put it in an installer, and you cannot fetch it yourself. The suggested fallbacks are worse: hold onto the copy you already have and verify its checksum, or fall back to OVF export, which is slower and clumsier.

Why it matters for your business

This is the shape of vendor lock-in that does not announce itself. Nobody raised your price, changed your license, or sent an email. A download page 404'd, and the cost of leaving went up.

If you run VMware anywhere — including one host quietly serving an ERP or a line-of-business app — do two things this week. Locate your VDDK tarball, put it somewhere you control with a recorded SHA-256, and note which version it is. Then ask your backup vendor, in writing, whether their product bundles VDDK under a redistribution agreement or expects you to supply it. That second answer decides whether your restores survive the next reinstall.

The general rule is older than Broadcom: an exit path you have never tested is a plan, not a capability. Migration tooling is part of your stack even on the days you are not migrating.

Sources: ShapeBlue, Platform9.