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This paper presents a two-stage genetic mechanism for the migration-based load balance of virtual machine hosts (VMHs) in cloud computing. Previous methods usually assume this issue as a job-assignment optimization problem and only consider the current VMHs’ loads; however, without considering loads of VMHs after balancing, these methods can only gain limited effectiveness in real environments. In this study, two genetic-based methods are integrated and presented. First, performance models of virtual machines (VMs) are extracted from their creating parameters and corresponding performance measured in a cloud computing environment. The gene expression programming (GEP) is applied for generating symbolic regression models that describe the performance of VMs and are used for predicting loads of VMHs after load-balance. Secondly, with the VMH loads estimated by GEP, the genetic algorithm considers the current and the future loads of VMHs and decides an optimal VM-VMH assignment for migrating VMs and performing load-balance. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated in a real cloud-computing environment, Jnet, wherein these methods are implemented as a centralized load balancing mechanism. The experimental results show that our method outperforms previous methods, such as heuristics and statistics regression.