Topgolf, the sports entertainment company operating over 100 venues worldwide, completed a significant infrastructure migration away from VMware following Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization platform provider. The company faced a 400 percent increase in VMware costs under Broadcom’s new licensing model, which shifted from perpetual licenses to bundled, subscription-based pricing. To address this, Topgolf moved approximately 12,000 virtual machines to VergeIO’s VergeOS platform, achieving cumulative savings exceeding $11.3 million.
The migration represented a substantial undertaking for Topgolf, which had relied on VMware technologies including vSphere, ESXi, and VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure since 2017. The company replaced 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers over a six-month period, reducing hardware spending by 87 percent while decreasing software costs by 77 percent. Topgolf secured a five-year enterprise license agreement with VergeIO, compared to the three-year terms VMware reportedly offered. By mid-December, the company expects to complete its full transition off VMware, with 20 venues still operating on VxRail systems during the final stages.
Topgolf selected VergeOS primarily for its multi-tenancy capabilities, which address a significant limitation in VMware’s architecture. The new platform allows Topgolf to segregate deployments by time zone, simplifying upgrades and maintenance across its distributed venue network. VergeOS’s integration capabilities and API-first approach enabled Topgolf to maintain its existing infrastructure-as-code tools, including Terraform and Ansible, without requiring complete retooling.
The migration involved substantial coordination beyond the server stack replacement. Topgolf simultaneously modernized its gaming architecture, relocating processing from servers to edge game panels in individual bays and adopting Kubernetes for its gaming stack. The company also addressed integration challenges with third-party monitoring tools such as Rubrik and LogicMonitor during the transition. VergeIO reported acquiring approximately 70 new customers quarterly, with most migrating from VMware, particularly those facing license renewals or hardware refreshes.
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