Topgolf Saves Over $11.3 Million After Migrating 12,000 VMs From VMware to VergeIO

Leaving VMware Behind

Topgolf, which operates more than 100 venues worldwide featuring interactive golf games with real-time shot tracking and digital analytics, used VMware's vSphere and ESXi for decades. The company began using VxRail, the hyperconverged infrastructure platform VMware co-engineered with Dell, in 2017.

Broadcom's decision to stop selling VMware perpetual licenses and bundle products into fewer, larger, and more expensive packages led Topgolf to expect a 400 percent cost increase. The company decided to migrate its on-premises workloads across venues, offices, labs, and data centers. According to Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, 20 venues still run VxRail with the VMware Cloud Foundation stack, but the company expects to be completely off VMware by the second week of December.

The Migration to VergeOS

Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in roughly six months, moving from six-node VxRail clusters with 35TB of storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB. Forehand said the shift to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent, while software costs decreased by 77 percent. The company also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement, compared to the three-year ELA that VMware reportedly offered.

Topgolf chose VergeOS, a platform combining compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking, and AI, largely for its multi-tenancy capabilities. Forehand said VMware lacked the ability to segregate clusters into tenants, which had become a nightmare to manage at scale. With VergeIO's Virtual Data Center offering, Topgolf organized its deployment by time zone, making upgrades and maintenance easier, and built nested labs within a single VergeOS cluster, reducing the need for lab hardware.

Savings and Challenges

VergeIO Chief Marketing Officer George Crump said most customers moving from VMware see meaningful reductions in software licensing costs, proprietary hyperconverged infrastructure appliances, and separate tools for data protection, replication, and multi-site management. VergeIO adds about 70 new customers per quarter, most of them former VMware users facing renewals, hardware refreshes, multiple sites, or multi-tenancy needs.

The migration was not without friction. Topgolf simplified its gaming stack and moved everything to the edge game panels in the bay, which meant replacing all game panels, rewiring the columns, swapping the server stack, and adopting a new Kubernetes gaming architecture. Integrating with third-party tools such as Rubrik and LogicMonitor was difficult, so the company adopted VergeIO snapshotting for data protection and pivoted to Veeam for threat hunting and ransomware protection. Forehand said overall challenges have been pretty minimal, describing the bigger task as a hearts-and-minds campaign to educate leadership on the gaps that do exist.

Sources: Arstechnica