A management software approach to automatic and dynamic migration of applications running within virtualized process collections while retaining state during the migration operation. Performance metrics are received for a virtualized process collection running in a first logical partition. A threshold value is calculated for the performance metrics. A performance state analysis of the performance metrics is executed to determine whether the calculated threshold value of the performance metrics exceed a maximum or minimum threshold specified in a stack tier policy for the virtualized process collection. A stack tier analysis of the performance metrics is executed to identify any trigger violations and determine a migration action to be taken for the virtualized process collection. Responsive to a determination that the number of identified trigger violations exceeds a trigger violation count, a migration event is generated to migrate the virtualized process collection to a second logical partition.