it may access and then finish processing them this storing of the resources is in lieu of returning those resources to the vm as may occur in a situation where the vm truly is done processing the associated packets in an embodiment those resources are stored in the vm in an embodiment information about those resources such as the number of packets outstanding in the vm is also saved in the vm when the vm is migrated to the target machine that information being part of the vm is migrated with it operation 314 depicts transferring the vm to the target machine in an embodiment this comprises to a live migration of the vm from the source machine to the target machine in an embodiment where the vm is paused while the live migration takes place this may include unpausing the vm so that it executes on the target machine in an embodiment where the vm is paused while it is on the source machine network communications received for it on the source machine are dropped while it is in this paused state while this impacts performance because those communications are not processed the vm may then be maintained in a static state and copied if packets are continually being added to the vm while it is being copied the contents of the vm 39 s memory will continually change and one may not be certain what the contents of the memory are when the vm is fully copied to the target machine.