Topgolf has eliminated more than $11.3 million in infrastructure costs by migrating its virtualization platform from VMware to VergeIO. The sports entertainment company moved 12,000 virtual machines to VergeIO’s VergeOS to avoid a projected 400 percent increase in licensing fees under Broadcom’s ownership.
Escaping Broadcom’s Pricing Model
Topgolf’s relationship with VMware was extensive. The company used vSphere and ESXi for decades and adopted VxRail, a hyperconverged infrastructure platform co-engineered with Dell, in 2017. Employees had long participated in VMware customer councils and contributed to industry case studies on virtualization.
The shift began when Broadcom stopped selling perpetual licenses and bundled products into larger, more expensive packages. This change forced Topgolf to reevaluate its long-term infrastructure strategy. Scott Forehand, Topgolf’s global infrastructure manager, noted that the company decided to migrate its on-premises workloads, including those supporting its venues, offices, and data centers.
Topgolf expects to be completely off VMware by the second week of December. Twenty venues still run VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation software, but the transition is nearly complete. Forehand stated that the company reduced or eliminated over $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs before recent hardware market adjustments.
Hardware and Software Savings
The migration involved replacing 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers over a six-month period. Topgolf moved from six-node VxRail clusters with 35 terabytes of storage to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5 terabytes of storage. Forehand reported that this shift reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent.
Software costs decreased by 77 percent. Topgolf secured a five-year enterprise license agreement with VergeIO, an improvement over the three-year agreement VMware had offered. George Crump, VergeIO’s chief marketing officer, said that while Topgolf’s savings are larger than average due to its scale, the trend of reducing licensing and proprietary appliance costs is common among VergeOS users leaving VMware.
Topgolf chose VergeOS primarily for its multi-tenancy capabilities. The company uses Virtual Data Center offerings to segment deployments by time zone. This allowed Topgolf to segregate clusters into tenants, simplifying upgrades and maintenance. Forehand explained that VMware lacked the ability to segregate clusters effectively, which created management challenges at scale.
Technical Challenges and Integration
The migration required significant technical adjustments. Topgolf replaced its gaming stack, moving processing from servers to edge game panels in the bays. This change necessitated rewiring columns, replacing game panels, and adopting a new Kubernetes gaming architecture. The company also integrated machine learning-driven golf ball tracing via its proprietary Toptracer system, which generates about 40 terabytes of network data daily per venue.
Integrating third-party software presented some friction. Topgolf uses Rubrik and LogicMonitor for monitoring and data protection. The lack of immediate Rubrik support for VergeOS led Topgolf to pivot to Veeam for threat hunting and ransomware protection. Forehand described the integration challenges as minimal, noting that the main hurdle was educating leadership on existing gaps.
VergeIO’s API-first approach allowed Topgolf to maintain its infrastructure-as-code tools, including Terraform and Ansible. The VergeIO team helped resolve latency and pathing issues for Toptracer traffic, spreading the load more effectively across cluster nodes. Topgolf’s move highlights the growing trend of enterprises seeking alternatives to VMware as Broadcom continues to reshape its product offerings.
Source: Ars Technica
