A VMware exit plan usually treats the migration tooling as a given — something you download, install, and use, not something you have to keep asking permission for. In late August, the public self-service path to the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) stopped working. No deprecation notice. No public transition announcement. A download path that migration documentation had relied on returned an error instead.
Microsoft, Red Hat, Nutanix, and Platform9 have all since surfaced the same underlying problem in their own documentation, support channels, or customer discussions: the public VDDK distribution path is no longer reliably available. The library itself has not simply ceased to exist. What changed is who can obtain it, through which channel, and under what relationship with Broadcom. That is a different problem than the one most exit plans were built to survive.
What People Thought Happened vs. What Actually Happened
The headlines settled fast on a simple read: Broadcom killed VDDK. That's not quite what the evidence supports.
What people thought happened: Broadcom removed the Virtual Disk Development Kit. The tool is gone. Migration and backup vendors that depend on it are stuck rebuilding their integration path from nothing.
