Topgolf is nearing completion of its exit from VMware after migrating approximately 12,000 virtual machines to VergeIO’s VergeOS platform, a move the company said reduced infrastructure costs by more than $11.3 million. The decision came after Topgolf anticipated a 400% increase in VMware costs following Broadcom’s changes to licensing and products.
Topgolf had relied on vSphere and ESXi for decades before adopting the VxRail hyperconverged platform, developed by VMware in cooperation with Dell, in 2017. However, the discontinuation of VMware’s perpetual licenses and the consolidation of products into fewer, higher-priced bundles prompted the company to reassess its on-premises infrastructure, including the environments at its venues, offices, laboratories and data centers.
Changing the Platform and Physical Infrastructure
Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers over six months. According to a case study published by VergeIO, the company moved from six-node VxRail clusters with 35 terabytes of storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5 terabytes.
Scott Forehand, Topgolf’s global infrastructure director, said comparable spending on hardware fell by 87%, while acknowledging that rising market prices for compute and storage reduced the savings compared with the original estimates. Software costs also fell by 77%, and the company obtained a five-year enterprise licensing agreement instead of the three-year agreement VMware had offered, according to the report.
Why Did Topgolf Choose VergeOS?
Isolating operating environments was a key factor in the decision. Topgolf uses VergeOS’s Virtual Data Center feature to divide the infrastructure into independent tenants according to time zones, which simplified updates and maintenance. It also enabled the creation of nested laboratories within a single cluster and reduced the need for dedicated laboratory hardware.
The platform also hosts Toptracer, Topgolf’s golf-ball tracking system, which relies on machine learning and drives approximately 40 terabytes of network data daily at a typical venue with 102 bays. VergeIO helped Topgolf address latency issues and distribute data traffic among cluster nodes. The company also benefited from VergeOS’s API-driven approach and its support for Terraform and Ansible to automate the infrastructure.
What Is Changing in Practice?
The migration does not simply represent the replacement of one virtualization software platform with another. It coincided with the replacement of gaming boards and rewiring, changes to the platform servers, and a move to a new Kubernetes-based gaming architecture aimed at reducing technical debt.
Integrations remain a significant challenge. Topgolf had difficulty maintaining some functions of third-party tools, including Rubrik and LogicMonitor. The company relied on VergeOS snapshot capabilities to replace some data-protection functions, then moved to Veeam to cover needs such as threat hunting and ransomware protection for which no immediate alternative was available.
Twenty of Topgolf’s venues still retain VxRail with the VMware Cloud Foundation package, but Forehand expects the exit from VMware to be complete by the second week of December. The experience shows that the financial savings can be substantial, but they depend on the size of the environment and on whether the migration coincides with hardware upgrades and application changes; compatibility with security and management tools also remains a question that must be resolved before adopting a VMware alternative on a broad scale.