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 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. Worth VMware User Group. 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. “Most customers who move from VMware see meaningful reductions in all three,” he said. VergeIO gets about 70 new customers a quarter, “and most of them are coming off VMware,” Crump said.
Most of those VMware migrators are facing renewal, are due for a hardware refresh, run many sites, or need multi-tenancy. “Most customers bundle the [migration from VMware to VergeOS] with a hardware refresh or a modernization effort, as Topgolf did with its gaming architecture. Scheduling all of that together is the real work,” Crump said. Topgolf’s migration Since Broadcom’s takeover, VMware competitors have been aggressively courting VMware users. Topgolf ultimately chose VergeOS, a virtualization platform that combines compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking, and AI, because of its tenancy.
Topgolf uses VergeOS’s Virtual Data Center offering for multi-tenant segmentation, where each tenant acts like an independent data center. Forehand explained: VMware lacks the ability to segregate clusters into tenants, which has made it a nightmare to manage at scale. Even VMware’s [Software-Defined Data Center] Manager product couldn’t manage the number of vCenter instances we had in our environment. With VergeIO, we have been able to segregate our deployment into tenants by time zone, making upgrades and maintenance much easier.
We’ve even been able to leverage tenancy to build nested labs within a single VergeIO cluster, which has saved [us] considerably on the requirement for lab hardware. Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in about six months. Per a case study that VergeIO published, Topgolf moved from six-node VxRail clusters with 35TB of storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB of storage capacity. “Moving to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent,” Forehand said. “Obviously, with the shift in the market and massive increases in compute and storage cost, we have taken a hit to the original numbers, but it’s still exponential.” Topgolf’s software costs, meanwhile, decreased by 77 percent. It also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement (ELA), compared to the three-year ELA that VMware reportedly offered.
Topgolf worked with VergeIO employees to develop a solution that accommodated some of its “weird” needs, such as performing machine learning-driven golf ball tracing via Topgolf’s proprietary Toptracer, which runs in the VergeIO cluster, Forehand said. “Toptracer … pushes about 40TB of network data from the cameras in a typical 102-bay venue per day. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and the VergeIO team helped us solve some latency and pathing issues with that traffic to spread the load more effectively across the nodes in the cluster,” he said. VergeOS also appealed to Topgolf because its end-to-end automation didn’t require Topgolf to retool its infrastructure-as-code. VergeOS being “API-first” was key here, Forehand explained, and its employees helped Topgolf develop support for infrastructure-as-code tools Terraform and Ansible early in migration.
Topgolf’s biggest challenge in ditching VMware has been coordinating all the projects it had to do alongside the server stack replacement. Forehand explained: On VxRail, Topgolf gaming was powered by the servers. With VergeIO, we simplified the gaming stack and moved everything to the edge game panels in the bay. That meant we had to replace all of the game panels, rewire the columns, replace the server stack, and swap to our new Kubernetes gaming architecture.
We also piled a few other projects in there with all of that to eliminate even more technical debt. As Topgolf reduced its use of VMware, it also encountered challenges trying to integrate its new virtualization platform with third-party software, like Rubrik and LogicMonitor, which 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 pretty minimal,” Forehand said. “The real challenge has been a hearts-and-minds campaign to educate leadership on the gaps that do exist.
With Rubrik, we moved to the VergeIO snapshotting to fill the data protection gap that not being able to use Rubrik left us, but we didn’t have an immediate answer for some of the Rubrik security features, like threat hunting and ransomware protection, so we’ve pivoted to Veeam to fill those gaps for us.” VergeIO’s strategy for addressing product integration challenges includes building the capabilities delivered through third-party offerings into VergeOS and partnering “on the ones that matter most,” Crump said. “Integration is the most common friction point, and it shows up after the migration. … A customer wants to keep using a tool it has already paid for and trained staff on. If that vendor doesn’t support VergeOS yet, the customer has to switch tools or run a workaround,” he said. Scharon Harding Senior Technology Reporter Scharon Harding Senior Technology Reporter 11 Comments Comments Forum view Customize
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