By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer
Publication Date: 2026-09-09 16:45:00
Broadcom recently revoked public access to a VMware software library widely used by other vendors to facilitate migrations to alternative server virtualization platforms, the vendor confirmed to TechTarget this week.
In an email Tuesday afternoon, a company spokesperson said the library, VDDK, is meant only for backup and recovery of VMware virtual machines by licensed VMware customers, and the recent removal of the utility from public download pages reflects that.
“The ability for individual organizations to download VDDK recently changed,” the spokesperson wrote. “The approved use case for VDDK per the SDK [Software Development Kit] license has always been for backup and recovery solutions from our TAP [Technology Alliance Program] partners, and this change merely re-enforces those terms.”
The library, which was previously freely available for download on a Broadcom developer page that now returns an error message, underpins VMware migration toolkits from several IT infrastructure vendors, including Microsoft Azure Migrate, Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit, and Nutanix Move. All of these vendors’ websites showed updates after August 25, reflecting that VDDK files were no longer publicly available.
Red Hat’s support website said it didn’t yet have a direct replacement for VDDKs as a workaround because the software is proprietary, licensed and can’t be directly copied as an open source tool.
There are alternative methods for migrating VMware environments to other…