FluidCloud replaces VDDK with its own disk copy engine for VMware exits
Network World ·
For organizations looking to migrate from VMware, the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) library is a critical component. VDDK is a set of C libraries for creating and accessing VMware virtual disk files, and until August of this year, it was available as a download. That is no longer the case . Many agentless migration tools used the libraries to read virtual disks. Broadcom has said licensed use of VDDK is for backup and recovery and that it is not a customer entitlement. Organizations partway through a VMware exit are now figuring how they will proceed. It is a gap that FluidCloud is now looking to fill with the vHOP (VM Hopping Engine) service launching today. With vHOP, FluidCloud bypasses VDDK, copying disks with its own cloning engine. vHOP also maps the VMware environment, translates VMware NSX firewall policy, and generates Terraform for the target cloud before any workload data moves. FluidCloud’s vHOP supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Nutanix, and it is available now in the FluidCloud platform and through AWS Marketplace. FluidCloud emerged from stealth in July 2025, with the promise of helping organizations to migrate across clouds, with a key focus being VMware migrations. In March 2026, the company introduced its Large Infrastructure Model (LIM) technology as a way to more effectively generate, translate, and validate Terraform across multicloud deployments. FluidCloud positions vHOP as a package that covers both the network side and the data transfer side of a VMware exit. “VDDK access was just one of the hurdles from getting away from VMware,” Harshit Omar , co-founder and CTO of FluidCloud, told Network World . How vHOP works VDDK lets a migration tool read the disk of a virtual machine (VM) remotely and copy only the changes after the first export, The FluidCloud engine exports the VM disk using Network File Copy (NFC) through standard application programming interfaces (API) on the VMware ESXi hypervisor. It then streams the virtual machine disk (VMDK) file over the network to the destination. Omar said the export captures everything, with no functionality loss. The engine does not do delta sync, so every export is a full export of the VM.Omar said restore and image creation are faster, with FluidCloud measuring a 2x improvement over VDDK. Snapshots cover only the data on a disk and not its provisioned size, which Omar said cuts the data transferred by about 5x. After the transfer, the tool remediates drivers and converts the image to the format the target cloud expects, such as the formats OCI and AWS use. A command line interface (CLI) takes a source and a target cloud account and reports progress. Users can run multiple pipelines in parallel. “We are able to do 1,000 plus VMs in one batch,” Sharad Kumar , co-founder and CEO of FluidCloud, told Network World . Planning happens before any data moves. vHOP comes in a self-service version that returns a plan in minutes and an engineer-led version that takes three days. The engineer-led version scans VMs, networks, NSX groups, and firewall policies through the VMware vCenter and NSX Manager APIs. It delivers a firewall plan that translates NSX rules for the target cloud, Terraform modules, and a recommended data path for each workload group. Where workloads are going In terms of where organizations are migrating workloads, the VDDK disruption isn’t changing the existing trends. Kumar said AWS and Azure see the most adoption among customers leaving VMware, and critical workloads stay with those two. In his experience, Google Cloud is used for narrower, non-critical workloads. Some customers move to another hypervisor, such as Nutanix. Kumar said more of them are now going straight to native public cloud services. “People want to use more AI-native services,” Kumar said. The other thing that people want is control. FluidCloud said sovereign cloud requirements are one of the biggest sources of demand. Most of the companies it talks to no longer see it as a migration tool. “They’re more looking at us as a resiliency tool. Like, can I do a backup and restore of my infrastructure in any other region or any other cloud?” Kumar said.