Patent ID: 8897573

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising a computer readable storage memory device having computer readable instructions tangibly embodied thereon which, when implemented, cause a computer to carry out a plurality of method steps comprising: identifying two or more blocks having identical content in two or more images in a virtual machine image repository; generating a block map for mapping the two or more blocks having identical content into a same block, wherein each entry in the block map points one of the two or more blocks to a destination address in a local disk cache associated with one or more blocks based on block content; deploying a virtual machine image by reconstituting an image from the block map and fetching any unique blocks remotely on-demand; de-duplicating virtual machine image accesses by storing the deployed virtual machine image in the local disk cache; and redirecting a read request for one of the two or more blocks to the corresponding destination address in a local disk cache based on the block map upon receiving the read request at a cache device.