A method for transferring guest physical memory from a source host to a destination host during live migration of a virtual machine (VM) involves (a) transmitting pages of the guest physical memory from the source host to the destination host over a network connection, (b) transferring state information from the source host to the destination host, (c) while performance benefits regarding continued access to the guest physical memory on the source host persist, using the transferred state information to run the VM on the destination host in place of running the VM on the source host, and (d) while the VM is running on the destination host, writing pages of the guest physical memory from the source host to a shared datastore such that the destination host can retrieve the written guest physical pages from the shared datastore.