Patent ID: 8219987

Claim:
A system comprising: a repository configured to store an executable application, resources included in a distribution of a general purpose runtime environment, a virtual machine specification, and an application environment specification, wherein the application environment specification identifies a subset of the resources included in the distribution of the general purpose runtime environment on which execution of the executable application is dependent, and wherein the virtual machine specification defines virtual machine attributes for a virtual machine container that are determined based on the subset of resources on which execution of the executable application is dependent; a provisioning server configured to use the application environment specification to locate the subset of the resources and to use the subset of the resources to generate an image of an application specific runtime environment for the executable application; a virtual machine manager configured to: create the virtual machine container using the virtual machine specification, wherein the virtual machine container includes characteristics based on the virtual machine attributes, the characteristics being configured for the subset of resources used to generate the image of the application specific runtime environment, and place the image of the application specific runtime environment in the virtual machine container.