Booting a virtual machine instance using remote direct memory access is provided. In response to beginning to receive pages of a predetermined set of pages corresponding to a requested image of a virtual machine from an image provider server, a boot process of an instance of the virtual machine is commenced while the received pages are written directly into a random-access memory (RAM) disk. The received pages are read from the RAM disk during the boot process of the instance of the virtual machine until transfer of the predetermined set of pages corresponding to the requested image is complete. The predetermined set of pages corresponding to the requested image are written to a local hard disk drive from the memory releasing memory usage. In response to completing the boot process, a RAM image is switched to a local hard disk drive image.