One embodiment of the present invention includes a method of making a bootable image for a computer, wherein the bootable image corresponds to a first virtual machine but is bootable on a target machine, the method comprising: (a) instantiating the first virtual machine within a virtualization system and executing computations thereof, the computations operating upon an encapsulation of virtual machine state for the instantiated virtual machine; and (b) introducing into the encapsulation, a boot loader that defines at least one transformation to be performed on the encapsulation to allow the target machine to boot from the virtual machine state.