Migration options following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware widened this week, in the form of a new low-end offering from Broadcom itself and a new open source project that supports migrations for smaller customers away from VMware.
VMware launched vSphere Express on November 4 for organizations with deployments of up to 128 processor cores. In parallel, a single engineer unveiled a new open source project, OpenVDDK, to replace the VDDK library that had supported server-level migrations of VMware virtual machines, to which Broadcom recently revoked public access.
OpenVDDK's creator said the project aligns with organizations looking to move away from vendor lock-in with Broadcom. It is an independently developed, open source re-creation of VMware’s VDDK interface, built from scratch by a single engineer, Andrija Panic, a senior cloud architect and consultant at ShapeBlue.
ShapeBlue was among the vendors whose VMware migration services were disrupted when VMware's VDDK ceased to be publicly accessible. VDDK is proprietary, but OpenVDDK's GitHub page claims the new project does not contain VMware code.
Panic said he has deep knowledge of vSphere and other VMware tools and platforms and remains a continuous user and VMware operator. OpenVDDK provides the disk-reading functionality that migration tools need, although it is not itself a complete migration toolkit.
“The idea is to enable people and hundreds of applications that already use and rely on VDDK for a proper transfer because it abstracts things for you,” Panic said in an interview this week. “Previously, people were inventing their own ways around VDDK, but they were only workarounds.”
From OpenVDDK to V2K Migrate
There are alternative methods for migrating VMware environments to other platforms using external storage systems, which competitors such as Red Hat recommend. Red Hat is also working on its own alternative to VDDK, according to officials on a media briefing call this week ahead of next week's KubeCon North America conference.
In contrast to the underlying OpenVDDK library, a planned independently funded standalone migration application called V2K Migrate has not yet been publicly released. Panic said he is distributing that project as a private beta via an email sign-up list on his website, which he said has attracted 200 subscribers.
OpenVDDK is an example of the recent pressure AI engineering is placing on legacy enterprises, according to Necco Ceresani, product lead for yeet.cx, an agentic infrastructure platform company.
“A new generation of open, programmable infrastructure is emerging across the entire market,” Ceresani said. “The economics and speed at which they are advancing is changing the build vs. buy argument for many teams, small and large.”
However, Panic said he remains deeply entrenched in managing VMware platforms.
“vSphere is one of the most solid, well-engineered platforms I have worked with. It simply works, and its storage and snapshot stack is excellent,” Panic said. “What changed isn't the technology, but the terms around it: licensing and access to the pieces other tools depend on, such as VMware's disk library, became much harder for smaller providers and open-source projects [to access]. That is why I built OpenVDDK and V2K Migrate, so people can keep running VMware, or leave it, on their own terms.”
vSphere Express extends tempting olive branch
Broadcom’s move is viewed by some as a response to disgruntled customers burned by licensing changes since VMware’s licensing model changed in 2024, which revamped its service tiers and resulted in some organizations — typically smaller customers — paying significantly more than they had in the past.
vSphere Express might renew interest among entry-level customers, since it includes advanced features of the vSphere hypervisor that will be difficult for DIY efforts to match, according to one industry expert. These features include live migration of VMs across servers using vMotion, automatic restarts of failed VMs, a distributed switch for centralized network management, and zero-trust security with support for a Trusted Platform Module.
“vSphere Express is VMware’s way of saying: ‘Why go through a painful and risky migration procedure, when all you need is a basic server virtualization platform for a small number of hosts?’" said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. "This is an interesting deviation from VMware’s current strategy of focusing on large accounts, and it will be interesting to see how support for these much smaller-than-originally-envisioned customers will be handled.”
Disclosure: The author's company uses VMware's free Hands-On Labs sandbox and is considering purchasing vSphere Express.
Bruce Gain is founder and principal analyst at ReveCom. His byline has appeared in Wired, PC World, CIO, Technology Review, Popular Science, and EETimes.
