A system and an article of manufacture for de-duplicating virtual machine image accesses include identifying one or more identical blocks in two or more images in a virtual machine image repository, generating a block map for mapping different blocks with identical content into a same block, deploying a virtual machine image by reconstituting an image from the block map and fetching any unique blocks remotely on-demand, and de-duplicating virtual machine image accesses by storing the deployed virtual machine image in a local disk cache.