Topgolf, the sports entertainment chain with over 100 venues worldwide, has saved more than $11.3 million after leaving VMware for VergeIO's VergeOS. The migration came after Broadcom's decision to stop selling perpetual licenses and bundle products into larger, more expensive SKUs, which would have raised Topgolf's VMware costs by 400 percent. The company moved 12,000 virtual machines, including workloads for venues, offices, labs, and data centers, and expects to be fully off VMware by early December.
Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, Scott Forehand, said the company's VMware connection "ran very deep," with decades of vSphere and ESXi use and VxRail deployments since 2017. But VMware's lack of tenant segregation made management difficult at scale. VergeOS's Virtual Data Center offering allowed Topgolf to split clusters by time zone, simplifying upgrades and maintenance, and even enabled nested labs within a single cluster, reducing lab hardware needs.
The migration took about six months. Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with roughly 400 Dell PowerEdge servers, cutting comparative hardware spend by 87 percent and software costs by 77 percent. It also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement, compared to the three-year ELA VMware reportedly offered. VergeIO's CMO noted that while Topgolf's savings are larger than typical, most customers moving from VMware see meaningful reductions in licensing, proprietary HCI appliances, and separate data protection tools.
Topgolf's biggest challenge was coordinating the server replacement with other projects, including simplifying its gaming stack and moving to a Kubernetes architecture. The company also worked with VergeIO to handle the heavy network traffic from its Toptracer golf ball tracking system, which pushes about 40TB of data per day from a typical 102-bay venue. VergeOS's API-first design allowed Topgolf to keep using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Ansible without retooling.