RackN, the bare metal automation company behind Digital Rebar, released the latest installment of its VMblog video interview series with CEO and co-founder Rob Hirschfeld. The conversation moves past whether to leave VMware and into the harder question most teams underestimate: what it actually takes to get a second stack into production and operate it at scale. The interview is available now on VMblog and on RackN’s VMware infrastructure page.
Recent licensing and packaging changes across the virtualization market sent a wave of enterprises looking at alternatives. But in the interview, Hirschfeld makes the case that the harder problem is the one teams underestimate: migrations rarely stall over which platform comes next — they stall over the operational reality of running hardware at scale.
In the interview, Hirschfeld walks through:
- The operational before-and-after — what changes once provisioning, firmware, and day-two work become repeatable pipelines instead of manual runbooks.
- The build-vs-buy question — why “we already have Ansible and Terraform” holds up until a fleet crosses several hundred nodes, where firmware exceptions and day-two remediation break script-based workflows.
- The migration runway — why teams that started 12 to 18 months ago are now hitting the “second stack to production” wall, and what a runway that actually reaches production looks like.
- The next 30 days — the single most valuable step a team can take now, framed as an operational decision rather than another platform evaluation.
“By the time most teams talk to us, they’ve already picked a direction. The hard part isn’t the destination — it’s getting the second stack to production and operating it at scale. That’s an operational discipline, and it’s the part teams most often underestimate,” said Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN.
Digital Rebar, RackN’s flagship platform, standardizes and automates the bare metal lifecycle — turning provisioning, configuration, firmware, and refreshes into repeatable pipelines — and stays vendor- and platform-neutral. That lets teams optimize their current VMware footprint now while preserving the flexibility to adopt alternative platforms later, without rebuilding their operating model or locking themselves into the next vendor.
“It’s not the ’90s calling to get their data center back. You should be moving into a 2026 data center. Repatriation isn’t a retreat — it’s a step forward,” Hirschfeld said in the interview.
The interview is available now at rackn.com/vmware-infrastructure, where teams can also find a workbook for optimizing VMware spend and request a VMware infrastructure assessment. RackN frames the assessment as a working session, not a sales call — a conversation with a team that has run global-scale infrastructure.
