Optimized migration of virtual objects across environments in a cloud computing environment

An apparatus comprising:

• at least one processor;
• a memory coupled to the at least one processor;
• a first virtual environment with a live virtual appliance having a plurality of virtual objects to be migrated to a second virtual environment;
• and
• an appliance migration mechanism residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, wherein the appliance migration mechanism minimizes cross-environment connections between the virtual objects during migration of the live virtual appliance from first virtual environment to the second virtual environment to optimize the migration by analyzing a cost of the cross-environment connections for each of the virtual objects during migration to produce an order of migration for the plurality of virtual objects;
• and
• wherein the appliance migration mechanism creates the order of migration by selecting each object from the initial cloud and moving it to the target cloud, determining how many connections are drawn to the target cloud, and adding the connections required to a total connections until all objects of the virtual appliance have been moved to the target cloud.