Abstract: A guest disk may be setup through the assistance of a restore environment. A restore environment may be bundled with partitioning software, and the restore environment may be a small, lightweight Linux™ environment that is operating-system agnostic. The restore environment allows any operating system image file to be deployed on the guest disk. The guest disk may be created through the use of virtualization software and a guest operating system.

Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed herein to a method of deploying a guest disk comprising: creating a plurality of virtual disks; partitioning each virtual disk into at least an OS partition and a data partition; launching virtualization software; booting the restore environment; downloading a OS partition image file and a data partition image file, wherein the OS partition image file and the data partition image file are smaller than a final system's OS and data partitions; expanding the OS partition image file onto the guest disk's OS partition to create an OS file system; expanding the data partition image file onto the guest disk's data partition to create a data file system; and resizing an OS file system and the data file system to access unused. portions of the OS and data partitions.