The provisioning of a virtual machine when booted from virtual storage. During virtual machine boot from an image, the virtual machine detects storage media. The virtual machine acquires a provisioning agent and provisioning data from the detected storage media. The virtual machine uses the provisioning data to provision itself, and executes the provisioning agent. The provisioning agent may monitor the progress of the provisioning and/or report a status of the provisioning. The virtual machine may operate in a cloud computing environment, the status of the provisioning agent being returned to the user through the cloud environment. The user need not generate the provisioning data in a format readable by the virtual machine. Instead, perhaps some naturally entered user input is used to automatically generate the properly formatted provisioning data using perhaps a service in the cloud.