---
title: "Topgolf Says It Cut $11.3 Million Leaving VMware for a Rival’s Stack"
description: "Broadcom’s pricing pushed a projected 400% cost increase; the case study behind the savings number has its own caveats"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-13T21:33:43Z
modified: 2026-10-14T03:21:02Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/topgolf-says-it-cut-11-3-million-leaving-vmware-for-a-rival--4d4bb7
language: en
tags: ["vmware", "virtualization", "topgolf", "broadcom", "migration", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Topgolf Says It Cut $11.3 Million Leaving VMware for a Rival’s Stack

*Broadcom’s pricing pushed a projected 400% cost increase; the case study behind the savings number has its own caveats*

By Luis Goa · October 13, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/topgolf-says-it-cut-11-3-million-leaving-vmware-for-a-rival--4d4bb7

## In brief

- Topgolf says it eliminated over $11.3 million in infrastructure costs leaving VMware
- Broadcom’s licensing changes had threatened a projected 400% cost increase for Topgolf
- Topgolf cut hardware spend 87% and software spend 77% migrating ~12,000 VMs to VergeOS
- 20 of Topgolf’s 100+ venues still run VMware, with full exit targeted for December 2026
- A Rimini Street survey found 90% of 269 VMware users are weighing alternatives over cost

Topgolf says it eliminated more than $11.3 million in combined infrastructure costs by moving roughly 12,000 virtual machines off VMware, according to a case study reported by [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/topgolf-saved-over-11-3-million-after-leaving-vmware/). The replacement is VergeOS, built by VergeIO, one of several hyperconverged-infrastructure vendors chasing accounts that Broadcom’s licensing changes have made restless. The trigger, according to Scott Forehand, Topgolf’s global infrastructure manager, was a projected 400 percent cost increase if Topgolf stayed on VMware’s new terms after Broadcom’s acquisition of the company.

VergeOS is a direct bet against the way Broadcom repackaged VMware. Where vSphere, once sold as a standalone hypervisor, now ships bundled into VMware Cloud Foundation with vSAN storage, NSX networking and vCenter management across subscription tiers, VergeOS folds compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking and some AI tooling into a single cluster image that runs on ordinary Dell servers rather than VMware-certified appliances. George Crump, VergeIO’s chief marketing officer, told Ars Technica the company signs up about 70 new customers a quarter, “and most of them are coming off VMware.”

Topgolf’s hardware swap was large. Out went 650 Dell VxRail hosts, VMware’s hyperconverged appliance line; in came about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers running VergeOS. Forehand put the comparative hardware spend down 87 percent and software costs down 77 percent. Topgolf also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement from VergeIO, against the three-year term it says VMware had offered. The rebuild spanned more than 100 venues, two data centers and Topgolf’s offices, and took about six months.

## What the $11.3 million actually covers

Forehand’s own framing carries two caveats. First, the figure covers “combined infrastructure costs” — hardware, software and backup together, not VMware licensing alone — and was calculated, he said, “prior to the adjustments in hardware cost in the market,” meaning it’s a snapshot taken before server prices moved, not a running total against today’s costs. Second, the percentage framing is contested even inside the deal itself: VergeIO’s own sales materials put Topgolf’s savings against VMware at about 45 percent, while [itwire reported](https://itwire.com/it-industry-news/virtualisation/70th-it-press-tour-vergeio-hires-a-vsan-veteran-to-chase-the-300-000-vmware-customers-broadcom-is-leaving-behind) that Topgolf itself estimates the figure closer to 96 percent once every line item is counted. Neither number is independently audited, and they use different baselines — a vendor’s standard comparison against one customer’s fuller accounting — so they are not the same claim measured twice.

**Topgolf's rig, before and after** Per-venue infrastructure, VMware/VxRail vs VergeOS/PowerEdge

| Metric | VMware / VxRail | VergeOS / PowerEdge |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Hosts (fleet total) | 650 VxRail hosts | ~400 Dell PowerEdge servers |
| Cluster size | 6 nodes | 3 nodes |
| Storage per cluster | 35 TB | 5 TB |
| Hardware spend | baseline | down 87% |
| Software spend | baseline | down 77% |
| License term | 3-year ELA offered | 5-year ELA secured |

Source: [Topgolf (Scott Forehand), via Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/topgolf-saved-over-11-3-million-after-leaving-vmware/)

One number in that table is harder to explain than the rest. Topgolf’s old VxRail clusters, six nodes each, carried 35 terabytes of storage; the VergeOS clusters that replaced them, three nodes each, carry 5 TB — an 86 percent cut in provisioned capacity per site, not an upgrade. Neither VergeIO’s case study nor Forehand’s account says whether that’s deduplication and thin provisioning doing real work, or whether the old VxRail clusters were simply over-provisioned for years. Dropping to roughly a seventh of the storage while running the same venues is the kind of number that invites an audit, not a press release.

The workload itself isn’t trivial. A typical 102-bay Topgolf venue pushes about 40 terabytes a day of camera-network data through Toptracer, the company’s proprietary ball-tracking system, which runs its machine-learning inference on that feed inside the VergeOS cluster rather than shipping it elsewhere. Running that volume through a cluster an order of magnitude smaller in raw storage than its predecessor only works if most of the data is processed and discarded rather than retained — a mechanic the case study doesn’t spell out.

[![Why Topgolf Moved from VMware to VergeOS](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1hJmek2_xGQ/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hJmek2_xGQ)

VergeIO’s recorded webinar in which Topgolf’s Scott Forehand and Jason Sova describe the migration alongside VergeIO’s George Crump. Video: Verge-io · YouTube

The migration wasn’t a clean swap of one hypervisor for another. Topgolf’s existing backup vendor, Rubrik, doesn’t integrate with VergeOS, so the company moved day-to-day snapshotting onto VergeIO’s native tooling and brought in Veeam to cover the ransomware-detection and threat-hunting features Rubrik had supplied. Twenty of Topgolf’s more than 100 venues are still running VxRail under VMware Cloud Foundation; the company expects to finish migrating them by the second week of December 2026.

**How Topgolf's stack changed** Simplified migration path, VMware to VergeOS

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| VMware vSphere / VxRail *(650 hosts, 6-node clusters)* | ioMigrate transfer *(~12,000 VMs, ~6 months)* |  |
| ioMigrate transfer *(~12,000 VMs, ~6 months)* | VergeOS cluster *(~400 PowerEdge servers)* |  |
| Rubrik backup *(incompatible with VergeOS)* | Native snapshotting | replaced by |
| VergeOS cluster *(~400 PowerEdge servers)* | Native snapshotting |  |
| VergeOS cluster *(~400 PowerEdge servers)* | Veeam *(fills threat-hunting gap)* | adds for security gap |
| VergeOS cluster *(~400 PowerEdge servers)* | Toptracer ML tracing *(40 TB/day camera feed)* | runs inference |

![How Topgolf's stack changed. Simplified migration path, VMware to VergeOS](https://rews.cc/img/325a09c58c9a8ace54cb0af65772495f4f436b01.webp)

Based on [Topgolf (Scott Forehand), via Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/topgolf-saved-over-11-3-million-after-leaving-vmware/)

## The market Broadcom built

Topgolf’s number is one data point in a market that Broadcom’s pricing created. A survey of 269 people at VMware-using organizations, commissioned by third-party support vendor Rimini Street and run by Unisphere Research between December 2025 and February 2026, found 90 percent considering a move off VMware over licensing costs, 73 percent naming cost savings a top priority, and 54 percent citing Broadcom’s end of support for perpetual licenses — figures [covered here](https://rews.cc/a/90-of-vmware-users-are-window-shopping-and-the-sneaking-susp-bdb7d3) when they were first published. Only 48 percent of the same respondents said they had no plans to move workloads onto VMware Cloud Foundation, the bundled stack Broadcom wants them on instead.

Other customers’ reported multiples vary by an order of magnitude depending on who’s counting. AT&T alleged a 1,050 percent proposed increase in a 2024 lawsuit that Broadcom settled confidentially later that year. CISPE, a trade association of 37 European cloud providers, told the European Commission its members saw increases of 800 to 1,500 percent, with costs “often” rising tenfold, according to [the Register](https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/05/22/vmware-price-hikes-800-1500-claim-euro-customers/1488879). Tesco, which still holds perpetual licenses covering about 40,000 virtual workloads, sued in September 2025 not over a specific percentage but over Broadcom’s mid-contract move to end-of-life perpetual support; it’s seeking at least £100 million in damages, and the case has since pulled in Dell and Computacenter as the supply chain behind the licenses, according to [Rack2Cloud’s tracking](https://www.rack2cloud.com/broadcom-vmware-lawsuit-legal-playbook/) of the litigation. Topgolf’s own 400 percent projection sits in the middle of that range.

VergeIO’s growth claims are self-reported: annual recurring revenue up more than 80 percent as of a February 2026 company update, built on Crump’s estimate of 70 new customers a quarter, mostly ex-VMware. Chief executive Parag Patel frames the opportunity as Broadcom and Nutanix fighting over VMware’s top 10,000 accounts while leaving roughly 300,000 smaller ones up for grabs, per itwire’s account of a VergeIO press tour. That’s a vendor’s market-sizing, not an audited one. Nutanix, the publicly traded rival VergeIO is implicitly pitching against, reported audited fiscal 2026 revenue of $2.854 billion, up 12 percent year over year, annual recurring revenue of $2.549 billion, up 16 percent, and more than 3,000 new customers added over the year, [per its results](https://ir.nutanix.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nutanix-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2026-financial-results). VergeIO, a private company, discloses no comparable filed numbers.

Topgolf’s case is a favorable one for VergeOS to publish: more than 100 venues running a near-identical three-node template, the kind of repeatable workload a smaller infrastructure vendor can standardize against. Twenty venues are still mid-migration. What the $11.3 million figure doesn’t yet show is what the tally looks like once those last sites move, once this year’s server prices are plugged back in, and once a customer running one large, non-repeated environment, rather than a hundred small matching ones, tries the same swap.

## See also

- [Global Survey Finds VMware Users Are Choosing Alternative Paths (press release)](https://www.riministreet.com/press-releases/new-global-survey-finds-majority-of-vmware-users-are-choosing-third-party-support/) — riministreet.com · Primary write-up of the 269-respondent survey on VMware licensing costs
- [Topgolf Customer Case Study — VergeIO](https://www.verge.io/topgolf-customer-case-study/) — verge.io · VergeIO's own landing page for the case study behind the $11.3 million figure
- [VMware customers in Europe face up to 1,500% price increases](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3994107/vmware-customers-in-europe-face-up-to-1500-price-increases-under-broadcom-ownership.html) — networkworld.com · Separate account of CISPE's price-hike claims, with Broadcom's response
- [Broadcom VMware Licensing in 2026 roundup](https://cloudinfra.blog/broadcom-vmware-licensing-in-2026-why-new-lawsuits-price-increases-and-customer-migrations-demand-a-fresh-look/) — cloudinfra.blog · 2026 overview of Broadcom-VMware licensing lawsuits and migrations