Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing has rev- olutionized the way we think of acquiring resources by in- troducing a simple change: allowing users to lease compu- tational resources from the cloud provider's datacenter for a short time by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources. This new model raises new challenges in the de- sign and development of IaaS middleware. One of those challenges is the need to deploy a large number (hundreds or even thousands) of VM instances simultaneously. Once the VM instances are deployed, another challenge is to si- multaneously take a snapshot of many images and transfer them to persistent storage to support management tasks, such as suspend-resume and migration. With datacenters growing at a fast rate and configurations becoming heteroge- neous, it is important to enable efficient concurrent deploy- ment and snapshotting that is at the same time hypervisor- independent and ensures a maximum of compatibility with different configurations. This paper addresses these chal- lenges by proposing a virtual file system specifically opti- mized for virtual machine image storage. It is based on a lazy transfer scheme coupled with object-versioning that demonstrates excellent performance in terms of consumed resources: execution time, network traffic and storage space. Experiments on hundreds of nodes demonstrate performance improvements in concurrent VM deployments ranging from a factor of 2 up to 25 over state-of-art, with storage and bandwidth utilization reduction of as much as 90%, while at the same time keeping comparable snapshotting perfor- mance, which comes with the added benefit of high porta- bility.