A method and system for offloading a software application intended to be run on a first virtual machine onto a second virtual machine. An original virtual machine is created. A periodic and/or computing resource-intensive application is supposed to be run on the original virtual machine. However, doing so may detrimentally impact the operation of the original virtual machine by consuming valuable computing resources. A replicated virtual machine which is basically a copy of the original virtual machine is created and ported over to a different host computer system. The periodic and/or computing-intensive application is now run on the replicated virtual machine instead of the original virtual machine. This leaves the original virtual machine free to continue its normal operations unaffected.