An improved architecture is provided which enables significant convergence of the components of a system to implement virtualization. The infrastructure is VM-aware, and permits scaled out converged storage provisioning to allow storage on a per-VM basis, while identifying I/O coming from each VM. The current approach can scale out from a few nodes to a large number of nodes. In addition, the inventive approach has ground-up integration with all types of storage, including solid-state drives. The architecture of the invention provides high availability against any type of failure, including disk or node failures. In addition, the invention provides high performance by making I/O access local, leveraging solid-state drives and employing a series of patent-pending performance optimizations.