In the virtual machine migration process, one of the most problems is how to select the candidate migrating virtual machine list from the abnormal physical hosts in cloud data center. Therefore, a Greedy Algorithm Optimization based Virtual Machine Selection algorithm (GAO-VMS) was proposed. In GAO-VMS, the virtual machines with the optimal objective functions would be selected to perform the migration and the candidate migration virtual machine list was formed subsequently. There are three kinds of greedy modes in GAO-VMS: Maximum Power Reduction Policy (MPR), minimum migration Time and Power Tradeoff policy (TPT) and Violated million instructions per second-Virtual Machines policy (VVM). GAO-VMS was evaluated on CloudSim simulator. Simulation results show that compared to the common virtual machine migration strategy, GAO-VMS reduces the energy consumption of cloud data center by 30% - 35%, and reduces the number of virtual machine migrations by 40% - 45% with 5% increment of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation rate and the joint index of SLA violation and energy. The proposed GAO-VMS strategy can be used for enterprises to construct green cloud computing center.