Topgolf’s VMware costs were going to increase by 400 percent under Broadcom. To avoid that cost, the sports entertainment company moved 12,000 virtual machines (VMs) to VergeIO’s VergeOS and has saved over $11 million so far. Before migrating, Topgolf’s VMware connection “ran very deep,” Scott Forehand, Topgolf’s global infrastructure manager, told Ars Technica.
Topgolf has over 100 locations worldwide featuring interactive golf games with real-time shot tracking and digital analytics. The company used vSphere and ESXi for decades and started using VxRail, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that VMware co-engineered with Dell, in 2017. Topgolf employees previously participated in numerous VMware customer councils and have been interviewed for books on how Topgolf used vSphere and Horizon (now Omnissa Horizon), per Forehand, who is a leader of the Dallas/Ft.
But Broadcom’s decision to stop selling VMware perpetual licenses and bundle VMware products into fewer, larger, and more expensive SKUs led Topgolf, as well as many other VMware customers, to look elsewhere. With VMware’s strategic changes complicating future planning, Topgolf decided to migrate its on-premises workloads, including those for its venues, offices, labs, and data centers. Twenty Topgolf venues are still running VxRail with the VMware Cloud Foundation software stack.
Forehand expects Topgolf to be completely off VMware by the second week of December. He added: Overall, we reduced or eliminated over $11.3 [million] in combined infrastructure costs prior to the adjustments in hardware cost in the market. Comparatively, 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.
The money Topgolf saved by moving to VergeIO isn’t typical because Topgolf has larger needs than many organizations. However, saving money on software licensing and avoiding proprietary HCI appliances and separate tools for data protection, replication, and multi-site management is common for VergeOS users coming from VMware, VergeIO Chief Marketing Officer George Crump told Ars.
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