VDDK Removal and Licensing Concerns
In late August 2026, Broadcom removed public download access to the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) with no notice and no archive. This library was used by many of the market migration tools to read and convert VMware virtual disks. This includes even other big players such as Nutanix (Move), AWS (Transform MGN) and Microsoft (Azure Migrate).
Broadcom’s official response through the customer care channels was not well received either. It stated, broadly, that the VDDK “is not a customer entitlement. It is a software development kit covered by its own developer license,” and access continues through “select TAP for its licensed use case, which has always been backup and recovery.”
While Broadcom has a point that the VDDK was always a separately licensed developer kit, the sudden pull created concerns for many customers undergoing a migration through these tools. Given the high renewal costs, strict minimums for renewal and late renewal penalties some customers are up against, the writing is on the wall.
A Myriad of Workarounds
While much of the coverage around this topic focuses on the challenges up ahead, there are plenty of alternatives for all the different scenarios. Vendors and partners that relied on the VDDK are quickly developing alternatives and many tools do not rely on the VDDK at all.
Take a look at the table below for some of the alternatives we felt are important to highlight:
For more information about third-party migration options mentioned by Microsoft, visit the following link.
As you can see, plenty of options still exist, all the way up to manually exporting and importing VMs on both sides. But many of these scenarios will cost you valuable time.
Now What?
If you’ve already downloaded the VDDK, or used your creativity to find it somewhere else, there’s still the question of ‘does that fall into the intended licensed purpose.’ We cannot really answer this, and we can’t say if Broadcom has a plan to challenge it in the near future either. Here’s a breakdown of our recommended strategy based on your urgency:
Where we come in
If you’re up against a tight renewal date, you’ll need all the help you can get. If someone’s telling you they can get you out of VMware in under 90 days, you either have a handful of machines or they’re not sharing the risk with your business. VDDK or not, there’s compatibility checklist, application certification and hardware constraints to worry about.
Rather than selling you on a hypervisor or a Cloud platform, our goal is to perform a thorough assessment and recommend the best solution and migration path for your scenario (even if that means staying captive a little longer).
Talk to us before you decide: solutions@samanagroup.com
Felipe Valencia
Senior Consultant
Samana Group
Lucas Blumer
Senior Consultant
Samana Group
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