GoKawiilJust when we thought that Broadcom wouldn’t be able to slow down customers moving off of vSphere to another platform. They may just now have done something that will have that net effect. This time it involves VMware’s Virtual Disk Development Kit, which we have always known as the VDDK. Broadcom has just killed the download of this library, and it will have far reaching consequences if this is a permanent move. Let’s see why this is a cause for alarm and why the VDDK is so important.
What is the VMware VDDK?
If you have never personally downloaded the VDDK you might assume this is some obscure VMware developer package that most just won’t ever need. And, you are right to some extent if you have no need to use the VDDK directly. However, what you might not realize is just how many tools that you probably ARE using that make use of it. Like what?
Well, here is the kicker. This library is central to many of the migration tools that are used to migrate from VMware to other platforms. It is used by tools like Microsoft Azure Migrate, Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit, Nutanix Move, VMware to KVM migration products, and other tools like virtv2v and nbdkit. So, for VMware customers who are trying to figure out what life after Broadcom looks like, this is yet another unexpected roadblock to leaving the platform.
What exactly did Broadcom change?
The reason this suddenly matters is that Broadcom has removed the normal publicly accessible VDDK download pages, and affected customers are reporting that Broadcom support has told them VDDK is no longer available for general use or download. See the Reddit thread here: Broadcom VDDK links : r/sysadmin.
If you now navigate to the link of the VDDK download where it was previously, you will see the following 404 page:
Vmware vddk 404 for the previous download page
Even stranger as it would seem, I have been unable to find a traditional Broadcom announcement explaining this change. So far, there has been no transition notice, deprecation announcement, or replacement tool or library announced.
Instead of this, many migration vendors and customers have seen in the last few day that links they have been pointed to are suddenly returning errors. This is much more interesting than an SDK just disappear. So, the net effect, no matter what Broadcom’s motivation might be is pretty hard for us to ignore at this point.
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