Fort Worth, Texas — Topgolf Saved $11.3 Million Ditching VMware

For decades, the servers running shot-tracking screens, reservation systems and back-office tools at more than 100 Topgolf venues worldwide leaned on a single vendor: VMware. Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, has sat on VMware customer councils, been interviewed for books about how Topgolf used vSphere and Horizon, and led the Dallas/Ft. Worth VMware User Group. The relationship, he told Ars Technica, "ran very deep."

That depth made the exit notable. Topgolf has moved 12,000 virtual machines off VMware and onto VergeIO's VergeOS platform, a shift the company says has already eliminated more than $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs. Forehand expects Topgolf to be fully off VMware by the second week of December.

Why Did Topgolf Leave VMware?

The trigger was price. Forehand told Ars Technica that Topgolf's VMware costs were set to rise 400 percent under Broadcom, which acquired VMware and has since stopped selling perpetual licenses in favor of fewer, larger, bundled subscription SKUs. That restructuring has pushed many long-time VMware customers to shop competitors, according to Ars Technica's reporting.

Topgolf had used vSphere and ESXi for years and adopted VxRail, the hyperconverged infrastructure platform VMware co-engineered with Dell, in 2017. Rather than absorb the projected cost increase, the company decided to migrate on-premises workloads across its venues, offices, labs and data centers.

How Much Has Topgolf Actually Saved?

Forehand put the figure at more than $11.3 million in reduced or eliminated infrastructure costs "prior to the adjustments in hardware cost in the market," he said, according to Ars Technica. He added that comparable costs today would be higher still: "it's much more now when you look at the cost of a solution similar to the configuration of the old VxRail solution we installed."

"Overall, we reduced or eliminated over $11.3 [million] in combined infrastructure costs." — Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager

VergeIO Chief Marketing Officer George Crump cautioned that Topgolf's savings are not a template for every customer, since the company's scale exceeds that of most organizations switching platforms. But he said the pattern — lower software licensing costs and the elimination of proprietary HCI appliances and separate data-protection, replication and multi-site tools — is common among businesses leaving VMware for VergeOS. "Most customers who move from VMware see meaningful reductions in all three," Crump told Ars Technica.

What Is VergeOS and Why Did Topgolf Pick It?

VergeOS is a virtualization platform combining compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking and AI tools in one package, according to Ars Technica's reporting. Topgolf selected the platform specifically for its tenancy model, using VergeOS's Virtual Data Center offering for multi-tenant segmentation across its sites.

Crump said VergeIO is adding roughly 70 new customers a quarter, and that most of them are coming off VMware. The customers making that switch tend to share traits with Topgolf: they are facing a license renewal, are due for a hardware refresh, operate many sites, or need multi-tenant architecture. "Most customers bundle the [migration from VMware to VergeOS] with a hardware refresh or a modernization effort, as Topgolf did with its gaming architecture," Crump said. "Scheduling all of that together is the real work."

How Deep Was Topgolf's VMware Relationship Before the Move?

The scale of the prior commitment is part of what makes the migration a test case for other large VMware shops. Topgolf's VxRail deployment dated to 2017, and the company's workloads spanned venues, corporate offices, engineering labs and data centers — the full footprint of a national entertainment chain running real-time golf-shot tracking and digital analytics at scale. Forehand's own history with VMware, from user-group leadership to customer-council participation, underscores how entrenched the technology had become before Broadcom's pricing changes forced a reassessment.

What Happens to Topgolf's Remaining VMware Sites?

The migration is not complete. Twenty Topgolf venues are still running VxRail on the VMware Cloud Foundation stack, according to Ars Technica. Forehand's December target would close that gap, moving the last holdout locations onto VergeOS alongside the rest of the company's infrastructure. Until then, Topgolf is operating in a hybrid state — a snapshot of the transition many VMware customers are weighing as Broadcom's licensing changes ripple through the market, per Ars Technica's reporting.

For a full accounting of the migration timeline and VergeIO's broader customer base, see Ars Technica's original report.