Topgolf Saved More Than $11.3 Million After Leaving VMware

Topgolf and VMware "Ran Deep" Before Migration.

Topgolf and VMware were "deep" before the migration.

VMware Topgolf's expenses under Broadcom will increase by 400%. To avoid this cost, the sports entertainment company migrated 12,000 virtual machines (VMs) to VergeOS VergeOS, saving more than $11 million so far.

Prior to the migration, Topgolf's VMware connectivity was "very deep," Scott Forehand, Topgolf's director of global infrastructure, told Ars Technica.

Topgolf has more than 100 locations worldwide that feature interactive golf games with real-time hit tracking and digital analytics. The company used vSphere and ESXi for decades and began using VxRail, a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that VMware engineered in partnership with Dell in 2017. Topgolf employees have previously participated in many VMware customer forums and have been interviewed for books on how Topgolf uses vSphere and Horizoneh, one of the leaders, from Horizonowm and Horizoneh. Dallas/Ft. Worth VMware User Group.

But Broadcom's decision to stop selling VMware perpetual licenses and package VMware products into fewer, larger, and more expensive SKUs caused Topgolf, as well as many VMware customers, to look elsewhere. With VMware's strategic changes complicating future planning, Topgolf decided to transform its on-premises workloads, including those related to its venues, offices, labs and data centers.

Twenty TopGolf locations still running VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation Forehand Software Stack expects TopGolf to be completely out of VMware by the second week of December. He added:

Overall, we reduced or eliminated more than $11.3 [million] in combined infrastructure costs before hardware cost adjustments in the market. In comparison, it is now much more when compared to the cost of a solution similar to the configuration of the old VxRail solution we had installed.

The money Topgolf is saving by moving to VergeIO is not typical because Topgolf has more needs than most organizations. However, cost savings in software licensing and avoiding proprietary HCI tools and separate tools for data protection, replication, and multi-site management are common for VergeOS users coming from VMware, VergeIO chief marketing officer George Crump told Ars.

"Most customers who migrate from VMware see significant reductions in all three," he said.

VergeIO gets about 70 new customers every quarter, Crump said, "and most of them are coming out of VMware." Most of these VMware migrants face renewals, need to upgrade hardware, run multiple sites, or require multiple tenancies.

"Most customers would associate [migrating from VMware to VergeOS] with a hardware upgrade or a modernization effort, like Topgolf did with their game architecture. It's real work to plan it all together," Crump said.

Since the Broadcom takeover, VMware's competitors have been aggressively reaching out to VMware users. Topgolf ultimately chose VergeOS, a virtualization platform that combines compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking and artificial intelligence because of its lease. Topgolf uses the VergeOS virtual data center for multi-tenant partitioning, where each tenant acts like an independent data center. Forehand explained:

VMware lacks the ability to separate clusters into tenants, which makes managing at scale a nightmare. Even the VMware [Software-Defined Data Center] Manager product could not handle the number of vCenter instances we have in our environment. With VergeIO, we've been able to separate our deployments into tenants by time zone, making upgrades and maintenance much easier. We have even been able to use tenancies to build nested labs within a VergeIO cluster, which has significantly saved on lab hardware requirements.

Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in about six months. According to a case study published by VergeIO, Topgolf migrated from six-node VxRail clusters with 35TB storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB storage capacity.

"Moving to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparable hardware costs by 87 percent," Forehand said. Obviously, as the market has changed and the costs of compute and storage have skyrocketed, we've hit the initial numbers, but it's still exponential.

Meanwhile, Topgolf's software costs fell 77 percent. It also secured a five-year Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) compared to the three-year ELA that VMware offered.

Topgolf worked with VergeIO employees to develop a solution that met some of its "quirky" needs, such as performing machine learning-based golf ball tracking through Topgolf's proprietary Toptracer, which runs on the VergeIO cluster, Forehand said.

"Toptracer ... pushes about 40 terabytes of network data from cameras in a typical 102-bay location per day. That's a lot of bandwidth, and the VergeIO team helped us solve some of the latency and routing issues with that traffic to spread the load more efficiently across the cluster nodes," he said.

VergeOS also appealed to Topgolf because its end-to-end automation didn't require Topgolf to retool its infrastructure as code. VergeOS "first API" was key here, Forehand explained, and its employees helped Topgolf support infrastructure tools such as Terraform and Ansible code at the beginning of the migration.

Topgolf's biggest challenge in ditching VMware was coordinating all the projects that had to be done in addition to replacing the server stack. Forehand explained:

On VxRail, Topgolf was supported by servers. With VergeIO, we simplified the gaming stack and moved everything to the edge gaming panels in the bay. This meant we had to replace all the game panels, rewire the columns, replace the server stack, and switch to our new Kubernetes game architecture. We also piled a few more projects in there to eliminate more technical debt.

As Topgolf reduced its use of VMware, it also faced the challenge of integrating its new virtualization platform with third-party software, such as Rubrik and LogicMonitor, that Topgolf uses to monitor its overall infrastructure.

VMware has been a leader in virtualization for decades, resulting in a wide range of enterprise products. This differs from newer competitors, which may not yet offer the same level of compatibility.

"Overall, the challenges have been very few," Forehand said. "The real challenge has been a hearts-and-minds campaign to educate leadership about the gaps that exist. With Rubrik, we went to the VergeIO snapshot to fill the data protection gap that made it impossible to use Rubrik, but we didn't have an immediate answer for some of Rubrik's security features, like threat protection, and things that we fill the gap for us."

VergeIO's strategy for addressing product integration challenges includes building capabilities that come into VergeOS through third-party offerings and partnering on those that matter most, Crump said.

"Integration is the most common friction point, and it appears after migration," he said. … the customer wants to use a tool that they have already paid for and trained their staff for. If that vendor does not yet support VergeOS, the customer must change tools or implement a workaround."

Sharon is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, writing news, reviews, and analysis about consumer gadgets and services. He has been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom's Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.