A mechanism for live migration of virtual machines (VMs) with memory optimizations is disclosed. A method of embodiments of the invention includes receiving a hash value for each of one or more memory pages of a migrating VM from a source host machine, obtaining a hash value for each of one or more memory pages hosted by a target host machine, and comparing the received hash values with the obtained hash values for matches. The method further comprises for each of the received hash values that do not match any of the obtained hash values, sending a negative acknowledgment to the source host machine for that hash value, and for each of the received hash values that do match any of the obtained hash values, using a memory page associated with the matching hash value at the target host machine for the migrating VM.