Placement of instances of virtual machine (VM) images in a cloud computing environment is optimized. A request is received to deploy a new VM image instance. VM resource usage profiles are read that indicate predicted resource consumption data of the VM image. Resource pool profiles for multiple resource pools are read that indicate predicted resource consumption data for the resource pools. For each of the resource pools, the VM resource usage profile is aligned with the respective resource pool profile. An aggregated resource consumption profile is calculated as an aggregation of the predicted resource consumptions of the aligned profiles. A determination is made of one of multiple resource pools with the least predicted aggregated resource consumption, and the VM image is instantiated on the determined one of the multiple resource pools with the least predicted aggregated resource consumption over time.