Three years into a VMware migration, and things aren’t going to plan? In this VMblog expert video interview, David Marshall talks with Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN, about what teams already in the thick of leaving VMware are actually landing on, and why so many migrations stall.

Rob explains why the most successful companies aren’t chasing a 100% to 0% VMware exit. Instead, they bring new platforms in for new workloads, rebuild their VMware fleets to get more value from the licenses they already pay for, and gradually reduce their dependency on VMware tooling. He also shares candid advice for teams frustrated by Broadcom’s move to bundled VCF packaging, and explains what the server and RAM shortage means for anyone running or refreshing infrastructure.

This is the third conversation in the series between David and Rob on bare metal infrastructure lifecycle automation and VMware migration challenges.

🔑 In this interview:

• Why “doing VMware better” is the surprise path for many teams leaving VMware
• The “surround and reduce” strategy: plant new platforms around VMware rather than attacking it head on
• Why alternatives to VMware aren’t necessarily cheaper, and why being mad at VMware isn’t worth the distraction
• How to respond to VMware’s push to the full VCF suite, and the lock-in risks of going deeper into the platform
• Why faster upgrade cycles are now unavoidable, especially with the coming wave of AI-driven patches
• How server and RAM shortages are pushing teams toward a multi-vendor hardware strategy
• Why decoupling the hardware vendor from the virtualization layer gives buyers leverage
• The single most valuable step to get unstuck in 30 days: stop, and rethink your assumptions
• A real-world story of a pharmaceutical company that turned around a stalled OpenShift virtualization pilot
• What makes a RackN working session different from a typical vendor demo, including a customer that onboarded brand new AMD servers in 20 minutes

👤 About the guest:
Rob Hirschfeld is CEO and co-founder of RackN, a bare metal operations software company. RackN is not a services, SaaS, hosting or hardware company. It creates an abstraction layer at the bare metal level so teams can run any hardware vendor and any platform above it, including VMware, OpenShift, Hyper-V, Proxmox and Nutanix.

🎙️ Hosted by David Marshall, VMblog