RISK-APPROPRIATE VALIDATION FOR LIVE OPERATING SYSTEM MIGRATION

Methods and systems for migrating a virtual machine instance between devices include one or more migration risk rules, each migration risk rule relating to a validation set having one or more validation substasks. A processor is configured to score a received migration request against one or more of the migration risk rules to generate one or more scores for the migration request, to compare each score to a respective threshold to determine if a level of risk according to the respective rule merits performing validation for the validation set, to validate the migration request by only those validation sets that correspond to the scores that exceed the respective threshold, and to trigger migration of a virtual machine to a target device in accordance with the migration request if none of the validation sets fail to validate the migration request.