An aspect of the present disclosure provides for migration of a virtual machine (VM) on a switched-fabric based computing system to another (external) switched-fabric based computing system or non-switched-fabric based (external) computing system. Both of such external computing systems are communicatively coupled to the switched-fabric based computing system by Internet such that the data transfer after the migration is based on IP packets on the Internet. According to another aspect of the present disclosure, an appliance contains multiple nodes for hosting virtual machines. A switched fabric switches packets between the nodes based on point-to-point connections between each pair of ports, wherein each port is coupled directly to a corresponding node. A bridge supports migration of a first VM to a first external system coupled to the first appliance by Internet Protocol (IP) based network.