System and method for operating system image provisioning in a utility computing environment

摘要

A technique to provision an OS image during a boot-up of a computing server in a utility computing environment using disk array's inherent raw concurrent multi-disk copy mechanism. In one example embodiment, this is achieved by forming a pool of OS image boot-up disks in a disk array using the disk array's internal disk copy routine. An OS image boot-up disk is assigned from the pool of OS image boot-up disks to the computing server upon receiving a request from the computing server. The OS image is then received from the assigned OS image boot-up disk. The computing server then boots-up using the received OS image and runs one or more applications residing in the computing server.