Topgolf, a sports entertainment company operating over 100 venues worldwide featuring interactive golf games, has completed a major infrastructure migration away from VMware to VergeIO’s VergeOS virtualization platform. The shift was prompted by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and subsequent strategic changes, including the discontinuation of perpetual licenses and consolidation of products into larger, more expensive packages that would have increased Topgolf’s costs by 400 percent.
The migration involved transferring 12,000 virtual machines across the company’s venues, offices, laboratories, and data centers over approximately six months. Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers, reducing comparative hardware spending by 87 percent. Software costs decreased by 77 percent, and the company secured a five-year enterprise license agreement with VergeIO compared to the three-year agreement VMware reportedly offered. Combined infrastructure cost savings exceeded $11.3 million, though this figure was higher than typical migrations due to Topgolf’s substantial operational scale.
Topgolf selected VergeOS primarily for its multi-tenancy capabilities, which allow better cluster segmentation by time zone and simplified management of the company’s complex infrastructure. The platform’s API-first design enabled seamless integration with Topgolf’s existing infrastructure-as-code tools, including Terraform and Ansible. VergeIO’s consolidated feature set—combining compute, storage, disaster recovery, and networking—eliminated the need for separate tools and proprietary appliances previously required under VMware.
The migration coordinated with broader infrastructure modernization efforts, including replacing all gaming panel hardware, rewiring venue columns, and transitioning to a Kubernetes gaming architecture. This consolidation addressed accumulated technical debt while moving game processing from central servers to edge game panels in individual bays. Integration challenges arose with third-party monitoring software like Rubrik and LogicMonitor, reflecting differences between established and newer virtualization platforms. Twenty Topgolf venues were expected to complete their transition from VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation by mid-December.
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