A method for transferring guest physical memory from a source host to a destination host during live migration of a virtual machine (VM) involves creating a file on a shared datastore, the file on the shared datastore being accessible to both the source host and the destination host. Pages of the guest physical memory are transferred from the source host to the destination host over a network connection and pages of the guest physical memory are written to the file so that the destination host can retrieve the written guest physical pages from the file.