Topgolf saved over $11.3 million after leaving VMware

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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.

在博通（Broadcom）的收购下，Topgolf 的 VMware 成本预计将增加 400%。为了规避这笔费用，这家体育娱乐公司将 12,000 台虚拟机（VM）迁移到了 VergeIO 的 VergeOS，目前已节省了超过 1,100 万美元。

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.

在迁移之前，Topgolf 与 VMware 的联系“非常深厚”，Topgolf 全球基础设施经理 Scott Forehand 告诉 Ars Technica。Topgolf 在全球拥有 100 多个场所，提供带有实时击球追踪和数字分析功能的互动高尔夫游戏。该公司几十年来一直使用 vSphere 和 ESXi，并于 2017 年开始使用 VMware 与戴尔共同开发的超融合基础设施（HCI）平台 VxRail。

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.

据身为达拉斯/沃斯堡 VMware 用户组负责人的 Forehand 称，Topgolf 的员工此前曾多次参加 VMware 客户委员会，并接受过关于 Topgolf 如何使用 vSphere 和 Horizon（现为 Omnissa Horizon）的采访。但博通决定停止销售 VMware 永久许可证，并将 VMware 产品捆绑成更少、更大且更昂贵的 SKU，这促使 Topgolf 以及许多其他 VMware 客户开始寻找替代方案。

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.

由于 VMware 的战略调整使未来规划变得复杂，Topgolf 决定迁移其本地工作负载，包括其场馆、办公室、实验室和数据中心的工作负载。目前仍有 20 个 Topgolf 场馆在使用运行 VMware Cloud Foundation 软件堆栈的 VxRail。Forehand 预计 Topgolf 将在 12 月的第二周完全脱离 VMware。

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.

他补充道：“总的来说，在市场硬件成本调整之前，我们减少或消除了超过 1,130 万美元的综合基础设施成本。相比之下，如果你看看与我们安装的旧 VxRail 解决方案配置类似的方案成本，现在的节省金额要多得多。”

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.

Topgolf 通过转向 VergeIO 所节省的资金并不具有代表性，因为 Topgolf 的需求比许多组织都要大。然而，VergeIO 首席营销官 George Crump 告诉 Ars，对于从 VMware 转投 VergeOS 的用户来说，节省软件许可费用并避免使用专有的 HCI 设备以及用于数据保护、复制和多站点管理的独立工具是常态。

“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.

“大多数从 VMware 迁移出来的客户在这三方面都看到了显著的成本降低，”他说。Crump 表示，VergeIO 每个季度大约有 70 个新客户，“其中大多数都是从 VMware 迁移过来的。”这些 VMware 迁移者大多面临续约、硬件更新、多站点运营或多租户需求。

“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.

“大多数客户会将（从 VMware 到 VergeOS 的迁移）与硬件更新或现代化改造结合起来，就像 Topgolf 对其游戏架构所做的那样。将所有这些工作安排在一起才是真正的难点，”Crump 说。

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.

Topgolf 的迁移：自博通收购以来，VMware 的竞争对手一直在积极争取 VMware 用户。Topgolf 最终选择了 VergeOS，这是一个结合了计算、存储、灾难恢复、网络和人工智能的虚拟化平台，原因在于其租户功能。Topgolf 使用 VergeOS 的虚拟数据中心产品进行多租户细分，每个租户都像一个独立的数据中心一样运作。

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.

Forehand 解释道：“VMware 缺乏将集群隔离为租户的能力，这使得大规模管理成为一场噩梦。即使是 VMware 的软件定义数据中心（SDDC）管理器产品也无法管理我们环境中拥有的 vCenter 实例数量。通过 VergeIO，我们能够按时区将部署隔离为租户，从而使升级和维护变得更加容易。”

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.

“我们甚至能够利用租户功能在单个 VergeIO 集群内构建嵌套实验室，这为我们节省了大量的实验室硬件需求。”Topgolf 在大约六个月内用约 400 台戴尔 PowerEdge 服务器替换了 650 台 VxRail 主机。根据 VergeIO 发布的一份案例研究，Topgolf 从具有 35TB 存储容量的六节点 VxRail 集群迁移到了具有 5TB 存储容量的三节点 VergeOS 集群。

“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.

“转向戴尔 PowerEdge 使对比硬件支出减少了 87%，”Forehand 说。“显然，随着市场变化以及计算和存储成本的大幅增加，我们最初的数字受到了一些影响，但节省幅度仍然是指数级的。”与此同时，Topgolf 的软件成本降低了 77%。它还获得了一份为期五年的企业许可协议（ELA），而据报道 VMware 此前仅提供三年期协议。

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.

Forehand 表示，Topgolf 与 VergeIO 员工合作开发了一种解决方案，以满足其一些“奇怪”的需求，例如通过运行在 VergeIO 集群中的 Topgolf 专有 Toptracer 执行机器学习驱动的高尔夫球追踪。“Toptracer……每天从一个典型的 102 个打位场馆的摄像头中推送约 40TB 的网络数据。这需要很大的带宽，VergeIO 团队帮助我们解决了该流量的一些延迟和路径问题，从而更有效地将负载分散到集群中的各个节点上，”他说。

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.

VergeOS 之所以吸引 Topgolf，还因为其端到端自动化功能不需要 Topgolf 重新调整其基础设施即代码（IaC）。Forehand 解释说，VergeOS 的“API 优先”特性是关键，其员工在迁移初期就帮助 Topgolf 开发了对基础设施即代码工具 Terraform 和 Ansible 的支持。

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.

Topgolf 在抛弃 VMware 过程中面临的最大挑战是协调服务器堆栈更换的同时必须进行的所有项目。Forehand 解释道：“在 VxRail 上，Topgolf 的游戏由服务器驱动。使用 VergeIO，我们简化了游戏堆栈，并将所有内容移至打位边缘的游戏面板。这意味着我们必须更换所有的游戏面板、重新布线、更换服务器堆栈，并切换到我们新的 Kubernetes 游戏架构。我们还在其中堆叠了其他几个项目，以消除更多的技术债务。”