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 readModern virtualization platforms face the paradox that defines infrastructure management: the need to be adaptable enough to serve unknown future workloads, while maintaining the ability to serve existing mission business-critical applications – all with accountability and resilience. The August 2026 release of Private Cloud Director addresses these needs directly, driven by customer and partner feedback
· September 15, 2026 · 4 min readHow 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 readPlatform9 is taking on the risk that has kept VMware migrations stuck: the uncertainty of how long they take. Under the 60-Day Production Guarantee, customers define a production milestone, reach it within 60 days, or cancel at no cost. Over the past year, Platform9 has become an established alternative for organizations seeking a more flexible
· August 26, 2026 · 4 min readA conversation with Chris DeFortuna, Cloud and Infrastructure Manager at Meriplex When Broadcom’s restructuring of the VCSP program cut Meriplex’s route to market, Chris DeFortuna and his team didn’t just lose a vendor relationship. They lost the foundation of a managed cloud business that had been running on VMware for nearly two decades, serving thousands
· July 9, 2026 · 6 min readIn the previous post, I introduced the mental model for CI/CD against Private Cloud Director (PCD): a provisioning phase driven by Terraform, a configuration phase driven by Ansible, and a handoff between them through dynamic inventory. In this post, I’d like to zoom in on the provisioning phase and walk through what a GitOps pipeline
· May 19, 2026 · 14 min readToday’s CIOs and CTOs are stuck between two real pressures. Development teams need infrastructure now. Compliance teams need control that holds up under audit. When either side wins completely, the organization loses. If it takes two weeks to get a VM through a request queue, teams don’t wait. They open a public cloud account. They
· May 8, 2026 · 4 min readIn earlier posts in the Automating Private Cloud Director series, I covered the Private Cloud Director (PCD) API, Terraform, Ansible, and enterprise integration patterns. Those posts focused on the primitives: the interfaces and tools you use to drive PCD programmatically. In this post, I’d like to shift from primitives to patterns, and specifically to the
· May 6, 2026 · 6 min readThis is the fourth post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. The previous posts covered the foundational toolchain: API authentication, Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and Ansible for infrastructure & post-deployment configuration. Those capabilities are sufficient for many organizations. But in enterprises with compliance requirements, regulated workloads, or large IT teams, “anyone can deploy from
· April 29, 2026 · 8 min readProviding private cloud resources across multiple teams is a standard deployment model in the modern data center. Whether you’re splitting infrastructure between Finance and Engineering, giving unique customers their own isolated infrastructure, or managing dev, staging, and production as distinct environments, multi-tenancy is table stakes in a virtualized environment. Deploying and managing isolated environments is
· April 27, 2026 · 9 min readThis is the third post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. In the first post, I covered the API surface and authentication. In the second, I walked through deploying a VM with Terraform. In this post, I’d like to cover Ansible. Where Terraform excels at declaring infrastructure state (“I want this VM, this volume,
· April 20, 2026 · 8 min readBroadcom’s acquisition of VMware didn’t just raise prices; it broke the math that most MSPs built their managed services practice on. If your margins depended on VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program pricing, you’ve probably already done the calculation and the numbers don’t work anymore. But the real problem isn’t the cost increase. It’s that
· April 16, 2026 · 6 min read
