Techniques for migrating a VM in a hybrid cloud computing system are provided. The techniques include identifying a similar VM at the destination, comparing dictionaries for the VM to be transmitted and the similar VM, and compressing the VM based on the comparison. After transmitting the compressed VM, the destination decompresses the VM using the dictionary of the similar VM. Dictionaries associate chunks of VM data with hashes of those chunks. This allows replacement of chunks with the hashes, thereby compressing the VM for transmission.