Thought Leadership
Facing looming cost increases of 400 percent under Broadcom, Topgolf has migrated 12,000 virtual machines to VergeOS. The transition is scheduled to conclude in December.
US entertainment company Topgolf has migrated roughly 12,000 virtual machines from VMware to the VergeOS platform by vendor VergeIO. The move was triggered by changes to licensing terms and product bundles introduced by Broadcom following its acquisition of VMware. According to Scott Forehand, Global Infrastructure Manager at Topgolf, the company’s VMware costs would have increased by 400 percent as a result.
“In total, we reduced or saved more than 11.3 million dollars in combined infrastructure costs, and that is prior to any adjustments for hardware costs in the market.”
Scott Forehand, Global Infrastructure Manager at Topgolf
The figure encompasses overall infrastructure costs rather than VMware licensing fees alone.
Decades on VMware
Topgolf operates more than 100 venues offering interactive golf games, ball tracking, and data analytics. For decades, the company relied on VMware’s vSphere and ESXi, adding VxRail—the hyperconverged platform jointly developed by VMware and Dell—in 2017. This was accompanied by VMware Horizon, which is marketed today as Omnissa Horizon.
New Hardware and Kubernetes
Over the course of the migration, Topgolf replaced roughly 650 VxRail hosts with around 400 Dell PowerEdge servers within six months. Compute workloads for the games were shifted from on-site venue servers directly to the gaming consoles at individual hitting bays and transitioned to an architecture running Kubernetes. Furthermore, standalone backup software and dedicated backup hardware were eliminated. Topgolf organizes deployments into tenants divided by time zones, which Forehand notes simplifies updates and routine maintenance. The company was unable to retain certain capabilities from tooling such as Rubrik and LogicMonitor.
Topgolf signed a five-year licensing agreement with VergeIO, whereas VMware had offered a three-year contract. At the time of reporting, 20 venues were still operating on VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation. They are slated to complete the transition by the second week of December.
More VMware Customers Exploring Alternatives
According to a survey commissioned by support provider Rimini Street, 90 percent of VMware customers are evaluating alternatives due to increased licensing costs. 40 percent cited operational complexity as the single biggest obstacle to switching.
(Editorial Team)
