Techniques to facilitate virtual machine (VM) host maintenance are disclosed. A host requiring maintenance is converted to a VM running on another host which satisfies certain requirements, such as having sufficient resources and the same network connectivity as the host requiring maintenance. As part of this physical-to-virtual conversion, or after said conversion, the VM may be synchronized to the host requiring maintenance, such that the CPU state and memory contents of the VM and host are identical. Active control may then be passed to the VM, and the host powered down for the maintenance. After maintenance is completed and the host powered back on, virtual-to-physical conversion may be applied to convert the VM back to the host. The host may then be synchronized to the VM, and active control passed back to the host.