Broadcom Pulled VDDK Downloads as VMware Exits Prove Out
Two stories landed 11 hours apart on September 7 and read together they're the whole strategy in one news cycle. At 11:01 UTC, Ars Technica reported Tottenham Hotspur cut VMware licensing fees by more than 85% by moving its stadium's server, storage and networking to HPE GreenLake — confirmed directly to The Register. At 22:12 UTC, Virtualization Howto documented that Broadcom has pulled public downloads of the VDDK, the library most VMware exit tooling runs on. 212 combined HN points across the two threads. Neither thread referenced the other.
The exit plumbing went dark first
The VDDK — Virtual Disk Development Kit — is how migration tools read VMware disks. Azure Migrate's agentless path, Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Nutanix Move, virtv2v, nbdkit: all of it. ShapeBlue documented the download pages returning errors on August 25. Red Hat published a KB on August 27 saying it cannot redistribute the proprietary bits. Platform9 wrote it up September 1. Microsoft has since added a warning to its Azure Migrate docs that Broadcom may restrict VDDK access, with slower agent-based migration as the fallback. That's 13 days from first breakage to HN front page with no announcement, no deprecation notice, no replacement. Broadcom support tells customers VDDK is "no longer available for use or download" — and points them at Technology Alliance Partner products. A r/vmware thread confirming the same from another ticket was removed by moderators.
Then the proof the exit works went viral
Tottenham is the rare defection with a public number attached: a global brand, a full stadium infrastructure stack, 85%+ licensing savings on the record. The day that proof hit the front page is the same news cycle the standard plumbing for leaving became unavailable. Coincidence is possible. But the burden now sits with Broadcom, and every week of silence is friction on the exit path while Red Hat says it's engineering alternatives that don't need VDDK at all.
A switching tax you can't quote
This is what a switching tax looks like when it's built quietly: a 404 where a download used to be, support redirecting you to partners, community threads getting moderated — no press release to rally against. Watch one thing: whether VDDK access returns behind the VMware Technology Alliance Program. If it does, the 404 wasn't an accident, it was a toll booth — and Tottenham's 85% is the discount everyone else is now queuing to pay for.