Topgolf, an entertainment company operating over 100 interactive golf venues worldwide, has completed a significant migration away from VMware infrastructure following Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization platform. The company had relied on VMware’s vSphere, ESXi, and VxRail technologies for decades but faced substantial cost increases under Broadcom’s new licensing model, which eliminated perpetual licenses and consolidated products into more expensive bundles.
The company moved approximately 12,000 virtual machines to VergeIO’s VergeOS platform over approximately six months, resulting in cumulative savings exceeding $11.3 million. The migration involved replacing 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers. According to Topgolf’s global infrastructure manager, hardware costs decreased by 87 percent while software costs fell by 77 percent. The company also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement, compared to the three-year terms VMware reportedly offered.
Topgolf selected VergeOS primarily for its multi-tenancy capabilities, which allow the company to segregate clusters by time zone and manage infrastructure at greater scale than VMware’s existing tools permitted. The platform’s integration of compute, storage, disaster recovery, and networking into a single solution, combined with its API-first architecture, enabled Topgolf to maintain its existing infrastructure-as-code practices using tools like Terraform and Ansible. VergeIO’s development team collaborated with Topgolf to address specific technical requirements, including optimizations for the company’s proprietary Toptracer machine learning system that processes approximately 40 terabytes of network data daily from venue cameras.
The broader migration involved coordinating multiple simultaneous projects beyond the infrastructure replacement. Topgolf redesigned its gaming architecture to shift processing from central servers to edge game panels, requiring replacement of gaming panels, rewiring, and adoption of a new Kubernetes-based gaming stack. The company addressed integration challenges with third-party monitoring software, including Rubrik and LogicMonitor. Twenty venues remained on VMware Cloud Foundation with VxRail technology at the time of reporting, with complete migration expected by the second week of December.
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