Topgolf says it avoided or eliminated more than $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs by moving most of its on-premises computing estate away from VMware. The migration covered 12,000 virtual machines and replaced a long-established VMware environment with VergeIO’s VergeOS platform.
The company began reconsidering its setup after Broadcom changed VMware’s licensing and product bundles. Topgolf global infrastructure manager Scott Forehand told Ars Technica that its projected VMware costs were set to rise by 400 percent. The company had used vSphere and ESXi for decades and adopted Dell and VMware’s VxRail hyperconverged systems in 2017, making the eventual transition a broad operational project rather than a simple software substitution.
Topgolf operates more than 100 locations with interactive games, ball tracking and digital analytics. Its migration spans venues, offices, laboratories and data centers. Twenty locations remained on VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation at the time of the report, with Forehand expecting the final systems to leave VMware by the second week of December.
The new architecture uses VergeOS to combine computing, storage, networking, disaster recovery and tenant separation. Topgolf organized deployments into tenants by time zone, which Forehand said simplified upgrades and maintenance. The same feature also let the company create nested laboratory environments inside a cluster, reducing the need for dedicated test hardware.
Hardware changed alongside the virtualization layer. Topgolf replaced about 650 VxRail hosts with roughly 400 Dell PowerEdge servers over six months. Its old sites used six-node clusters with 35 terabytes of capacity, while the replacement design used three-node clusters with 5 terabytes. Forehand put the comparative hardware-spending reduction at 87 percent and the software-cost decline at 77 percent. Topgolf also obtained a five-year enterprise licensing agreement.
The overhaul reached into the company’s games. Topgolf shifted processing from venue servers toward game panels at individual bays and adopted a Kubernetes-based architecture. That required new panels, rewiring and replacement server stacks. Its Toptracer ball-tracking system remained demanding: Forehand said cameras at a typical 102-bay venue produce about 40 terabytes of network traffic daily, requiring work with VergeIO to address latency and traffic paths.
Compatibility was one constraint. Topgolf could not keep every capability tied to products such as Rubrik and LogicMonitor. It used VergeIO snapshots for data protection and turned to Veeam for some security functions, including threat hunting and ransomware protection. The migration therefore combined savings with substantial coordination, equipment replacement and changes to supporting tools rather than merely swapping one hypervisor for another.
