Patent ID: 8880470

Claim:
A method of migrating persistent data of a virtual machine from a source data store to a destination data store, the method comprising: distinguishing static persistent data from dynamic persistent data, the distinguishing being based on frequencies of changing the data while the virtual machine is executing, wherein the static persistent data is less frequently updated than the dynamic persistent data; copying the static persistent data at the source data store to the destination data store; copying the dynamic persistent data at the source data store to the destination data store; during the copying of the dynamic persistent data, updating a bitmap data structure to indicate which blocks of the dynamic persistent data have been modified, the bitmap data structure being particular to the dynamic persistent data; and utilizing the bitmap data structure for iterative copying of the dynamic persistent data being modified, including identifying the blocks of dynamic persistent data that have been modified using the bitmap data structure and copying the identified blocks of dynamic persistent data to the destination data store.