Executive Summary In late August, Broadcom ended public downloads of their VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) from their website. The VDDK is a set of libraries and APIs that enables external software like backup, recovery, and migration tools to access and transfer data from VMware virtual disks managed through vSphere or hosted on ESXi
· September 17, 2026 · 4 min read
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
· September 1, 2026 · 4 min read
Executive Summary Private Cloud Director uses KVM as its hypervisor and QCOW2 as its native disk format. This architectural choice decouples the hypervisor, disk format, and storage layers eliminating the tight interdependencies that characterize the vSphere stack and providing infrastructure teams with a non-proprietary foundation for their virtual machine workloads. Because every layer in the
· March 6, 2026 · 6 min read
For any cloud administrator, one of the essential starting points for managing their cloud deployment is to ensure there is a consistent set of base images from which appropriate instances can be spawned. A popular tool that helps with such cloud image management is Packer, developed by HashiCorp, the makers of Vagrant. Packer allows you
· January 13, 2016 · 6 min read
One of the benefits that Platform9 customers most value with our managed cloud offering is the ability to take advantage of new innovations and capabilities without having to shoulder the burden that often comes with new software releases. This includes all the testing that needs to be performed prior to putting new technology in production. It includes
· November 18, 2015 · 3 min read
Have you ever botched your VM’s network configuration? Maybe you forgot to allow SSH traffic in your firewall settings? How do you fix the network configuration when you cannot even SSH into your VM? One usually sits in front of their physical machine to fix such issues. But with the advent of virtualization, there is
· November 11, 2015 · 4 min read
It’s been few days since the most recent OpenStack Summit ended and the word that comes to mind when I reflect on the week that just past is “stability.” Some may even call it boring and that is a good thing. This is not to say there wasn’t exciting news such as new customer use cases
· November 5, 2015 · 4 min read
We recently announced General Availability for Platform9 support of VMware vSphere, including 100% interoperability with existing vSphere infrastructure and management tools to make Platform9 the best cloud management solution for vSphere. I highlighted the benefits of our solution in a blog post and indicated that we would be providing more technical details in the future.
· September 10, 2015 · 7 min read
Back in January, we made our SaaS delivered Cloud Management-as-a-Service solution generally available to the public, with initial support for new and existing KVM environments. Since then, we’ve seen an increasing number of customers who have bought into the concept of an easy button for private clouds where they can focus on building applications and leveraging existing infrastructure management
· August 17, 2015 · 6 min read
One of the more interesting developments that we are seeing within our customer base and among the users we speak with regularly is the growing desire to understand OpenStack hypervisor support and leverage OpenStack as a “manager of managers” for different types of technologies such as server virtualization and containers. This lines up with the messaging
· August 12, 2015 · 11 min read
This blog post has been updated to include details on a related talk we’ve proposed for the upcoming OpenStack Summit. You can find out more about the voting process and learn about other talks submitted by Platform9 by reading our prior blog post. VMware vSphere and OpenStack are the shining stars in their respective fields –
· July 28, 2015 · 5 min read
The Tokyo OpenStack Summit is only three months away and the process to choose the various talks and workshops that will be given at the Summit has begun. For the Vancouver Summit in April, the Platform9 team submitted three (3) talks; for the Tokyo Summit, we’ve stepped things up and submitted fifteen (15) talks and workshops.
· July 24, 2015 · 7 min read