Abstract: Systems and methods for monitoring health of virtual machines (VMs) include determining a leader virtual machine (VM) count for a group of VM nodes hosted on a plurality of computing devices; selecting a number of the VM nodes of the group to serve as leader VMs for the group, the number of the VM nodes selected corresponding to the leader VM count; and periodically performing a peer VM monitoring process. The peer VM monitoring process includes periodically storing health information for each of the VM nodes of the group in a data store; periodically accessing the health information of each of the VM nodes to identify sick VMs using each of the leader VMs, respectively; and automatically performing a healing process on the sick VMs to improve a performance of the sick VMs.