Topgolf Says It Saved $11.3 Million Leaving VMware. Twenty Venues Still Run It.

Topgolf says it has saved more than $11.3 million by leaving VMware. As of October 13, 2026, it has not finished leaving. Twenty venues still run VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation. Scott Forehand, the company's global infrastructure manager, told Ars Technica he expects the last of them off by the second week of December.

What the $11.3 million is made of

Forehand told Ars the figure is a combined one for infrastructure. Ars reports that Topgolf's VMware costs were headed up 400 percent under Broadcom, and that its software costs fell 77 percent after the move. Forehand put the drop in comparative hardware spend at 87 percent. Topgolf swapped 650 VxRail hosts for about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in about six months.

The hardware number has a second explanation. Ars, citing a case study VergeIO published, says Topgolf went from six-node VxRail clusters with 35TB of storage to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB. Half the nodes and a seventh of the capacity shrink a bill before any discount arrives. Ars does not say whether the two capacity figures are measured the same way. I could not check the case study itself, because VergeIO's page for it sits behind a sign-up form and carries no numbers.

A rebuild with a price tag nobody printed

Forehand's account of the project reads less like a swap than a rebuild. On VxRail, the golf games ran on the servers. Topgolf had to replace all of the game panels and rewire the columns. It also changed the server stack and moved to a Kubernetes gaming architecture, with "a few other projects" folded in. One workload on the new clusters is Toptracer, its shot-tracing system. A typical 102-bay venue pushes about 40TB of camera data a day through it.

George Crump, VergeIO's chief marketing officer, told Ars that most customers pair a VMware exit with a hardware refresh. "Scheduling all of that together is the real work," he said. Ars does not report what the panel replacement and rewiring cost. The piece never draws the line between money saved on VMware and money Topgolf was going to spend on new gear anyway.

Nothing in the migration was free of friction. Topgolf could not keep Rubrik for backup on the new platform, so it moved to VergeOS snapshots. It then brought in Veeam to cover the threat hunting and ransomware protection Rubrik had handled. Forehand is a leader of the Dallas/Fort Worth VMware User Group and described Topgolf's VMware ties as running "very deep." He called the technical challenges minimal. The real challenge, he said, was educating leadership on the gaps.

Topgolf is the exception, by the numbers

Ars notes that Topgolf's savings are not typical, because its needs are larger than many organizations'. The wider data points the same way. Network World reported in June on Broadcom's March earnings call. CEO Hock Tan said over 87 percent of the company's 10,000 largest customers had adopted the full VMware Cloud Foundation subscription. CIO Dive reported VMware revenue up 13 percent year over year in Broadcom's first fiscal quarter of 2026, with total contract value above $9.2 billion.

People are looking at the exit. They are mostly not through it. Network World cited a survey commissioned by the software company CloudBolt. In it, 87 percent of respondents were actively shrinking their VMware footprint, and 4 percent had completed a full migration. It also cited Gartner analyst Paul Delory as saying that untangling from VMware can take a midsized organization two years and a large enterprise up to four. Migration costs, he said, can cancel out the savings.

VergeIO adds about 70 customers a quarter, Crump said, and most of them come off VMware. That is roughly 280 a year at most, by my arithmetic, against a Broadcom base that Network World puts above 300,000. Small shops feel the pressure most. Network World lists a 72-core minimum order, up from 16, among Broadcom's changes. The Register reported in 2025 that distributor Arrow told partners a server with one eight-core processor would pay for 72 cores, 64 of them unusable. Broadcom had not answered The Register at the time.

What would settle it

The Ars story carries no response from Broadcom, so the 400 percent figure and the $11.3 million both rest on Topgolf and its vendor. I found no line-by-line breakdown from either. Until the last 20 venues come off in December, "left VMware" describes a plan with a savings estimate attached. Broadcom's own count says most of its largest customers have gone the other way.