A virtual hard disk drive containing a guest operating system is bound to a source computing device through encryption. When the virtual hard drive is moved to a difference computing device, a virtual machine manager instantiates a virtual machine and causing the virtual machine to boot the operating system from the virtual hard disk drive. Because the guest operating system is encrypted by an encryption device on a source computing device, the virtual machine causing the decryption of the guest operating system with a copy of the key. The virtual hard disk is bound to the target computing device through encryption based on a hardware on the target computing device.