6 ms·
Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads
- toomuchtodo 19d agoIs a magnet torrent available?
- Daneel_ 18d agoThere's a normal torrent avaiable from archive.org? https://archive.org/download/vddk_20260825/vddk_20260825_archive.torrent https://archive.org/download/vddk_20260825/vddk_20260825_arc... From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825 https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 18d agoOkay then magnet:?xt=urn:btih:bb5565a679e22985842c1243a93300f123762366
- uriahlight 18d agoThe sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
- throw0101a 18d ago> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks). Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
- kiney 18d agoI was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
- Avicebron 18d agoWell good news, it's improved quite a bit. File level restore is a thing now..
- throw0101a 18d ago> I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016... Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary": * https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.174684/#post-812204 https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746... There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit). A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity. I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.) (Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
- gerdesj 18d agoI started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago. It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day) I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie. It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
- b3lvedere 18d agoIt's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?
- WokeUp420 18d agoProxmox is good for a home lab but running an enterprise on it is a joke. Good luck with that
- anonreplier 18d agoYou work for Broadcom don't you fella?
- WokeUp420 18d agoNo I work for a 100 year old Fortune 50 with 50,000 VMs.
- anonreplier 17d agoHow much has their licensing bill gone up in the last 5 years?
- Jedd 18d agoFrom TFA > VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ... Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'. IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance. All automatable, I'm sure.
- BLKNSLVR 18d agoDid the same thing a looong time ago. Was worried about how it would go, but it was surprisingly painless. Love proxmox now.
- _joel 18d agoProxmox been great for decades. I used it back in 2011 when I was sysadmin for https://sahanafoundation.org/eden/ https://sahanafoundation.org/eden/ - we had multiple live instance running for the site, wiki, translation, GIS. Just when kvm was getting support too (not openvz) so it was nice an snappy running on some donated poweredge 2950's (thanks zen.co.uk!) Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.
- akulbe 18d agoMore VMware - winning friends and influencing people, like usual.
- guidedlight 18d agoI blame Broadcom. They behave like an aged care home for software, who actively engages in financial abuse.
- lokar 18d agoThe bought it to squeeze it dry in its last few years. It’s one of their main business models. Buy declining companies with good customer bases, cut spending and raise prices.
- SanjayMehta 18d agoAvago's business model, not the original Broadcom's
- lokar 18d agoTrue. I’m not sure which “faction” runs the company now, but I’d guess it’s not the engineering company.
- nubinetwork 18d agoRather than converting the cold vm disk, couldn't you boot up the vm, dump the disks to stream, and send the streams into another format?
- Neywiny 18d agoProbably better to get the vm into a ramfs or any other way to not be currently on it. Otherwise it'll likely be pretty corrupted
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- watusername 18d agoYes, this is Microsoft's "agent-based migration" option mentioned in the article.
- WokeUp420 18d agoAgent based requires an insane amount of privileged accounts and I would say fails for 10%+ of the VM population
- WokeUp420 18d agoTry doing that to 3,000 production VMs.
- nubinetwork 18d agoWhere do you work that a single sysadmin manages 3000 VMs?
- rwmj 18d agoWe're running a migration from VMware to Red Hat Openshift Virt for one customer right now which is over 150,000 VMs. That's a big one, but five figure number of VMs is very typical. I gave a 5 min lightning talk about this a couple of years back: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/ https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/ People talking here about Proxmox make me laugh.
- ramgine 18d agoI got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively? I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
- sigmoid10 18d agoI actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.
- simoncion 18d ago> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows... I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run. Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
- protocolture 18d agoI remember reading some obscure customer doco that "The old fax server is running on the virtual host" And I was like... what virtual host? What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack. A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
- msie 18d agoTime to sue!
- firesteelrain 18d agoWe run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.
- Incipient 18d agoThis is the only POSSIBLE rational argument for this approach. 4x price, on 1/2 the customer base is still 2x revenue with less customers to deal with. They want to keep the Big Corp clients that are happy to pay. Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?
- yndoendo 18d agoIt will work for some time for Broadcom. They are private equity (PE); jack prices and don't care about the quality. Heard the stories from a previous company taken by PE. Big business never think of the future. Good example is when two companies merged the brought down the cost of poly. Took a couple years for gravitation to the mean to bring up the base cost. They kept thinking it would stay low form them with being so big. The Big Business that are staying with VMWare really should be tasking to know the cost of replacement with estimated time frame with a known successor. Yet, MB are blinded by staying with a known working tool. Perform the task on a few servers to reduce cost while investing in the education to do so. Big MBs really don't have a clear idea of investing wealth.
- WokeUp420 18d agoDell private cloud lock in would be the death of any company. You don't want to be isolated to one hardware vendor. We've told Dell to kick rocks many times for renewals and would not be able to do that if we were in their Cloud, which requires Dell hardware. Don't do it
- firesteelrain 18d ago
- dare944 18d ago> I am of the school of thought that even if Broadcom gives VMware Standard away free for a year, it would be hard to convince customers that they need to stick with the platform Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
- soamv 18d agoAs an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible before its rapidly decreasing value goes to zero. There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.
- SanjayMehta 18d agoYou need to remember this isn't Broadcom the chip company at work, this is really Avago which took on the Broadcom name when they acquired the latter. Avago's business model is to acquire cash cow businesses and then milk them dry. These VMware changes are consistent with that model.
- throw0101a 18d ago> […] this is really Avago which took on the Broadcom name when they acquired the latter. For a visual representation of this see the "Edgar suit" from the movie Men in Black. :)
- the_alchemist 18d agoAnd sugar is dollars :'D
- m4rtink 18d agoBroadcom/Avago, please buy Atlassian! I beg you, pretty please! You will make an insane amount of money and make the world a much better place!
- dessimus 18d ago
- jijji 18d agoi thought everyone got rid of vmware in 2007 when virtualbox came out... wow cant believe people still pay for that
- SanjayMehta 18d agoAs a user of VMware Desktop who switched to VirtualBox, my experience was VMware was just so much easier to use. I now use UTM to host Windows 11 Pro on my mac for exactly one Windows application. With the exception of suspend, it does the job.
- p0w3n3d 18d agoDo you host arm win11 or intel?
- SanjayMehta 18d agoARM
- technion 18d agoVmware vsphere is not at all in the consumer space where virtualbox exists.
- measurablefunc 18d agoShould be possible to reverse engineer it with AI.
- dosisking 18d ago> Should be possible to reverse engineer it with AI. Might as well rewrite it in Rust at the same time, two birds with one stone.
- anonymousiam 18d agoSo the Linux qemu-img tool can still convert VM disk images from .vmdk into formats compatible with all the other hypervisors. Is there something more to the process of VM migration from VMWare than just using this tool (and manually creating the proper virtual hardware profile in the new hypervisor)? Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually something that can be dealt with separately.
- nn3 18d agoExactly. Either everyone is confused, or something is missing from the article.
- rwmj 18d agoThe problem is how you access the disks that are sitting on a VMware server. VDDK allows you to connect and read them (in raw format, in fact) at a reasonable speed, and also understands sparseness and change block tracking.
- jasomill 18d agoI suspect the bigger problem is simply the fact that VDDK workflows are already defined and integrated into migration software packages. Otherwise, there are other options to copy virtual disks from ESXi hosts to other destinations that preserve sparseness and don't require shutting detaching or shutting down hosts using the disks, e.g., cloning a snapshot to an NFS server that supports sparse files.
- justsomehnguy 18d ago> Is there something more to the process of VM migration from VMWare than just using this tool (and manually creating the proper virtual hardware profile in the new hypervisor)? Yes? Do that for the hundreds of VMs, with a minimal downtime, bonus points for a dumb C-level on your neck. You would quickly learn what "just converting disk images" is not enough for moving between hypervisors. Just as an example: last year I moved a company with two Proxmox servers to ESXi. It took a 3 months and another server as a staging point. A minuscule in modern times 1TB+ VM took a whole weekend to be moved. Of course it didn't work in that time.
- BLKNSLVR 18d agoCan someone exfiltrate the VMWare source so that it can be distributed at a later date once Avago (Broadcom) cease? A friend of mine said that VMWare was still the best VM platform due to the ecosystem that built around it, so it'd be nice if it could be preserved for later resurrection. I know time moves on quickly, but it'd be a shame to lose it entirely. I know this is promoting criminality, but there's something wrong with society if this is deemed criminal. Disclaimer: don't (be a hero)
- tosti 18d agoIIRC the guy who wrote a hypervisor for OpenBSD found severe vulnerabilities in VMware. It doesn't surprise me and I don't think a quasi-legal fork would be a worthwhile avenue.
- PunchyHamster 18d agoThere is nothing to be saved there. There is nothing "special" in VMWare now aside from having the enterprise support, and frankly any effort would be better spent making KVM/libvirt more "enterprise friendly"
- vmwarestole 18d agoMost of VMware virtualization code was stolen from kvm and they never were punished. Our laws are a joke, our courts are largely illegitimate and so to is our government.
- rrgok 18d agoReally? I always thought KVM came to existence aftern VMware.
- consp 18d agoMy guess is it's referring to ESXi's GPL'd (or not GPL'd) code and the 2016 suit which failed (on procedural grounds).
- dramm 18d agoYou are hallucinating and don't have any clue what you are talking about (VMware employee #10/11 -- I lost count, First Director of PM at VMware). VMwware sure as hell did not invent the hypervisor, and we were damn careful not to ever claim that. The early unique IP was how to enable a hypervisor to use dynamic translation where required to work around non-virtualizable x86 instructions, we also did well with how to package a hypervisor to run on a host/share host devices etc. Over time that early differentiation went away as we helped encourage CPU vendors to include better hardware virtualization support. And the other big thing we had was just a market focus/desire to deliver value/delight nerdy users like ourselves. Who is the granddaddy of hypervisors? It sure ain't KVM, and it sure ain't VMware. That would be IBM. They had decades of doing hypervisors on the mainframe when we were getting started as a tiny startup. They sure know a lot about hypervisors and had a x86 hypervisor research project in Watson labs. We were humbled when IBM fellow Rich Oehler came to us wanting to partner because he saw how far ahead we were. That was years before KVM even got started. The IBM collaboration, lead to years of great work with IBM, who helped VMwware get going with ESX Server. Although the focus of VMware since founding was always to end up focusing on the data center/server market we could not have done that so well and so fast without IBM and sales and GTM cooperation. Now good on KVM and others for pushing open hypervisor technology, and any company in this space who actually cares about their users and customers. I hope KVM helps pound VMware/Broadcom into the dirt. Edit: typos
- p0w3n3d 18d agoI have fond memories of the first VMWare "BIOS" running inside my windows, this was so magical. It's sad to watch these things slowly perish
- vrighter 18d agohaving worked heavily on backup software, ho are vm backups supposed to work now?
- rwmj 18d agoVMware are shipping VDDK to backup vendors directly (and only to backup vendors).
- raincom 18d agoWhen one becomes too comfortable with one vendor way of doing things, you end up paying 10's of millions of dollars in the end. Move the work loads to KVM, and invest in your own employees, and you can migrate off of VMware easily.
- jasonvorhe 18d agoI have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored. Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that. How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways. Some people just need to learn through pain.
- vintagedave 18d agoIt can take a lot of time to migrate. People who've known about Broadcom's behaviour for some time may still be working towards solving it. Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't think we should feel "very little pity" for people like that (sympathy is human): but I'd instead say, I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.
- dramm 18d agoLeaving VMware just got harder? What? NO! It just became more obvious that you've failed if you are still stuck there. (VMware employee #10/11 -- I lost count. First Director of PM).
- dramm 18d agoAnd I know that sounds like victim blaming. Anybody stuck in this situation has my empathy. But I just don't know how to get it across to some company execs/leaders that they have been needing to get their act together and get off VMware for coming on near 3 years now.
- WokeUp420 18d agoI'm in the middle of a massive Azure Local migration and noticed the VDDK was no longer available... Kinda funny because I was just telling a coworker how surprised I was that they offered it. Thankfully I saved off my copy but I have no idea how Microsoft is going to handle this going forward with Azure Migrate. Same issue with SUSE I believe
- st3fan 18d agoFire up the coding agents. This is a solvable problem.
- stroebs 18d agoVMware is still seen as "platinum" level in my org compared to Proxmox, which I guess to a certain degree is true. But the features in use are basic VMs with vMotion. Proxmox provides that out of the box. Granted we've had a couple issues with a corosync wobble on larger clusters which was fixed long-term by putting corosync on a separate set of switches. So far the Proxmox experience has been pretty flawless. We run a several hundred k8s VMs orchestrated by Rancher and use the dynamic load balancing feature that came with 9.2 so no noisy neighbours. Haven't dabbled too much with Ceph as the VMs are backed with NetApp arrays but I anticipate it to be pretty smooth when we reach that point.
- spjt 18d agoI'm kind of glad this is all happening because it provides a nice example to point to when I try to explain why I don't want to be dependent on a vendor for these sorts of things.
- freedomben 18d agoFor real, it's been the most validating of my use-open-source ethos than any other examples I can think of! For this open source isn't about the cost, it's about the vendor dependence/neutrality, and that's quite important when it becomes essentially a business requirement.
- 28304283409234 18d agoRsync exists. I remember migrating a red hat 3 with a 2.4 kernel to VMware in 2014. Physical to virtual. It’s just files on a disk folks. Rsync, grub-install. And boot.
- Almondsetat 18d agoAny torrents to keep it alive?
- csydas 18d agojust for reference most enterprise backup products are not affected by this and will have vddk for backups and restores. if your backup product supports cross platform restores likely migration is not blocked for you, and many free / trial editions are likely generous enough for most small - medium shops to migrate on the free offering if you already pay for an ent backup product check if it can restore from vmware backups to another platform and you’re prolly fine (for now)