Topgolf, a sports entertainment company operating over 100 venues worldwide, completed a major infrastructure migration away from VMware following Broadcom’s acquisition and subsequent changes to the vendor’s licensing model. The company faced a projected 400 percent increase in VMware costs under Broadcom’s new pricing structure, prompting leadership to evaluate alternative virtualization platforms.
The company migrated approximately 12,000 virtual machines to VergeIO’s VergeOS platform over approximately six months, consolidating 650 VxRail hosts down to about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers. This shift generated combined infrastructure cost reductions exceeding $11.3 million, with hardware spend declining by 87 percent and software costs decreasing by 77 percent. Topgolf secured a five-year enterprise license agreement with VergeIO, compared to the shorter terms offered by VMware.
Topgolf selected VergeOS primarily for its multi-tenancy capabilities, which allowed the company to segregate its deployment by time zone and simplify management across numerous venues and data centers. The platform’s unified approach—combining compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking, and AI functionality—eliminated the need for separate tools that were previously required. VergeIO’s API-first architecture also enabled Topgolf to maintain its existing infrastructure-as-code tools without significant retooling.
The migration involved coordination with multiple concurrent projects, including upgrades to gaming hardware and a transition to a Kubernetes-based gaming architecture. Integration with third-party monitoring and backup software presented challenges, though Topgolf characterized overall obstacles as minimal. The company expects to complete its transition off VMware by mid-December, with approximately 20 venues still running VxRail infrastructure during the transition period.
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