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Topgolf avoided an estimated 400 percent cost increase under Broadcom by migrating its virtual infrastructure to VergeIO’s VergeOS platform. The sports entertainment company moved 12,000 virtual machines and has saved over $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs so far. Scott Forehand, Topgolf’s global infrastructure manager, noted that their previous VMware connection was very deep, involving decades of use with vSphere and ESXi technologies. Broadcom’s decision to stop selling perpetual licenses and bundle products into larger, more expensive packages prompted Topgolf to look for alternatives.

Forehand expects Topgolf to be completely off VMware by the second week of December. The company replaced 650 VxRail hosts with approximately 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in about six months. According to Forehand, moving to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent, while software costs decreased by 77 percent. Topgolf also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement, compared to the three-year term reportedly offered by VMware. George Crump, VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer, stated that most customers migrating from VMware see meaningful reductions in infrastructure costs.

A key driver for the migration was VergeOS’s ability to segregate deployments into tenants based on time zones, which Forehand described as a nightmare to manage with VMware at scale. Topgolf uses this feature to build nested labs within a single cluster and simplify their gaming architecture by moving workloads to edge game panels. While Forehand noted that integration challenges with third-party tools like Rubrik were minimal, the company had to pivot to Veeam for specific security features. VergeIO’s API-first approach allowed Topgolf to develop support for infrastructure-as-code tools Terraform and Ansible early in the migration process.