The disclosure provides an approach for selecting a path to use in transferring a virtual computing instance such as a virtual machine (VM), across data centers. In one embodiment, throughput and throttling information are sampled (e.g., per second) when VMs are transferred from a source data center to a destination data center, and the sampled information is used to construct histograms that provide performance profiles of the VM transfers. Such histogram information across a number of VM transfers can then be mined to determine trends. In turn, trends determined from historical histogram information may be extrapolated into the future to predict performance of a subsequent VM transfer operation and to select a path and/or destination storage and host pair to use for the VM transfer operation.