Topgolf saved over $11.3 million after leaving VMware

Topgolf and VMware "ran deep" before the migration. Topgolf saved over $11.3 million after leaving VMware. Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav 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. 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 many 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.