Although the use of virtual environments provided by cloud computing infrastructures is gaining consensus from the scienti c community, running applications in these environments is still far from reaching the maturity of more usual computing facilities such as clusters or grids. Indeed, current solutions for managing virtual environments are mostly based on centralized approaches that barter large-scale concerns such as scalability, reliability and reactivity for simplicity. However, considering current trends about cloud infrastructures in terms of size (larger and larger) and in terms of usage (cross-federation), every large-scale concerns must be addressed as soon as possible to e ciently manage next generation of cloud computing platforms. In this work, we propose to investigate an alternative approach leveraging DIStributed and COoperative mechanisms to manage Virtual EnviRonments autonomicallY (DISCOVERY). This initiative aims at overcoming the main limitations of the traditional server-centric solutions while integrating all mandatory mechanisms into a uni ed distributed framework. The system we propose to implement, relies on a peer-to-peer model where each agent can e ciently deploy, dynamically schedule and periodically checkpoint the virtual environments they manage. The article introduces the global design of the DISCOVERY proposal and gives a preliminary description of its internals.