Methods and systems for booting virtual machines in the cloud

A non-transitory machine-readable medium having stored thereon instructions for performing a method of booting a virtual machine, the non-transitory machine-readable medium comprising machine executable code which, when executed by at least one machine, causes the at least one machine to:

• load a boot program from a volume of a cloud-associated storage system to a virtual machine;
• send a request for a boot configuration to a boot server using the boot program;
• receive the boot configuration from the boot server;
• establish communication with a networked storage system using a network-based storage interface protocol based on the boot configuration;
• and
• boot an operating system for the virtual machine from a root volume of the networked storage system based on the boot configuration.

A computing device comprising:

• a memory containing machine readable medium comprising machine executable code having stored thereon instructions for performing a method of booting a virtual machine during input/output (I/O) operation;
• and
• a processor coupled to the memory, the processor configured to execute the machine executable code to cause the processor to:
• load a boot program from a volume of a cloud-associated storage system to the virtual machine;
• establish communication with a networked storage system using a network-based storage interface protocol based on a boot configuration acquired via the boot program;
• and
• boot an operating system for the virtual machine from a root volume of the networked storage system based on the boot configuration.