Kai had always liked solving problems. As the site reliability engineer for a small startup, they slept well knowing backups ran like clockwork—until the day the nightly snapshot job failed. Error logs pointed to a corrupted agent; the team needed a fresh toolchain to rebuild the backup pipeline. The one bright hope was the VMware VDDK: the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit, a set of libraries and utilities that let programs read, write, and snapshot virtual disks.
esxcli system version getvdiskmanager.exe -ws.VDDK is a collection of C/C++ libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation designed to help developers and administrators create applications that can access and manipulate virtual disk files (VMDK) independently of the guest operating system. In simpler terms, VDDK allows third-party backup solutions (like Veeam, Commvault, or Rubrik) to perform image-level backups, file-level restores, and granular recovery without needing an agent inside every virtual machine. download vmware vddk
Alternative Download Link: Due to recent portal transitions, Broadcom has provided a temporary public box folder containing various VDDK versions for easier access. Downloading VMware VDDK — A Short Story Kai
Select the correct version
VDDK must be compatible with your ESXi version. Check your current vSphere version: esxcli system version
The VDDK is distributed by VMware (now part of Broadcom) as a standalone package. It is not included in the standard ESXi or vCenter ISO files.
(Network Block Device) to bypass standard LAN traffic during backups. developer.broadcom.com Download and Licensing Requirements