Techniques disclosed herein generally describe providing fault tolerance in a virtual machine cluster using hardware transactional memory. According to one embodiment, a micro-checkpointing tool suspends execution of a virtual machine instance on a primary server. The micro-checkpointing tool identifies one or more memory pages associated with the virtual machine instance that were modified since a previous synchronization. The micro-checkpointing tool maps a first task to an operation to be performed on a memory of the primary server, where the first task is to resume the virtual machine instance. The micro-checkpointing tool also maps a second task to an operation to be performed on the memory of the primary server, where the second task is to copy the identified memory pages associated with the virtual machine instance to a secondary server. The first and second tasks are then performed on the memory.