A base caching disk and associated methods for facilitating fast instantiation of virtual machines in distributed computing systems are disclosed herein. In one embodiment, a method includes during an instantiation process of a virtual machine on a node in the distributed computing system, determining whether a base caching disk on the node contains a block of data of the image needed for the instantiation process of the virtual machine. The method can also include, in response to determining that the base caching disk does not contain the block of data, retrieving the block of data from the central image store without retrieving the entire image, writing the retrieved block of data to a sector on the base caching disk at the node and subsequently, marking the sector containing the written block of data on the base caching disk as read-only.