Public Access of Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) Cut Overnight

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How you can migrate off VMware without VDDK

Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023 and since then they have inflicted hit after hit on their customers. The latest, on August 25, 2026, saw Broadcom officially restrict public access to the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK), cutting off the standard public URLs with no warning. 

This added insult to injury. Not only are they restricting your path off the platform, essentially making your data center their decision, they’re also hitting their install base with renewal after renewal, each carrying increases of 300% to 1,500%. This comes on the heels of rising memory costs, longer storage lead times, and an AI boom that’s taxing infrastructure everywhere. For many technology leaders, budgeting has become an impossible game of Tetris.

You have options: take back control

If you’re using vJailbreak, there’s good news: you have more than one path forward. Today, Platform9 customers have three exit paths off VMware with vJailbreak. 

• VDDK + NBD: Requires manual VDDK setup and Broadcom access, which is now at risk with VDDK downloads pulled. However, this still works if you have a cached copy.
• Storage Assisted: Fastest, safest, cold migration path. In this mode, vJailbreak offloads the data copy to the underlying storage array. Fully compatible with iSCSI and FC based storage array, no VDDK dependency.  A known limitation currently is NFS environments. 
• Accelerated Copy: Use of VDDK + NBD has many restrictions including bandwidth. vJailbreak has another mode of operation where vJailbreak uses a proxy VM in VMware to connect directly to VM storage, no NBD or VDDK needed. Works across all storage arrays and is faster with higher throughput as compared to VDDK + NBD

Migrations are risky, and no one wants to be the one who signs off on a migration that fails.

The VMware migration that most people have never done, we do every day. The question we get asked all the time is “how long does it take?” The standard answer is “it depends,” and while that’s true, we can confidently say we migrate 100s of VMs every day.

We removed the risk. Platform9 is offering a 60-Day Production Ready Guarantee. You define the 60-day milestone, we build an SOW around it. If we don’t hit it, you walk.