US Patent 9977698 Virtual machine migration into the cloud

The migration of virtual machines internal to a cloud computing environment. The cloud maintains the replicas for virtual machines that could be migrated. The cloud also is aware of location of user data for each of the virtual machines. The replica together with the user data, represents the virtual machine state. If migration to the cloud computing environment is to occur for any given virtual machine, the cloud computing environment correlates the replica with the user data for that virtual machine, and then uses the correlation to instantiate the virtual machine in the cloud.