Provisioning applications in a heterogeneous virtual environment

A method of provisioning application volumes for attachment to virtual machines, the method comprising:

• provisioning an application in a virtual volume of a first virtual drive format;
• identifying one or more alternative virtual drive formats for the application;
• and
• duplicating the application in the virtual volume to one or more additional virtual volumes corresponding to the one or more alternative virtual drive formats;
• and
• storing the virtual volume and each of the one or more additional virtual volumes in separate storage locations, wherein each of the storage locations is accessible by a different set of virtual machines associated with a particular virtual drive format.

A system to provision application volumes for attachment to virtual machines, the system comprising:

• a plurality of storage repositories;
• a provisioning manager configured to;
• provision an application in a virtual volume of a first virtual drive format;
• identify one or more alternative virtual drive formats for the application;
• duplicate the application in the virtual volume to one or more additional volumes corresponding to the one or more alternative virtual drive formats;
• and
• store the virtual volume and each of the one or more additional virtual volumes separately in the plurality of storage repositories, wherein each storage repository in the plurality of storage repositories is accessible by a different set of virtual machines associated with a particular virtual drive format.