1. A method comprising: receiving at a cloud manager an instruction to initiate a group of hosts on a remote server; receiving a group profile at the cloud manager from a database, the group profile comprising a set of group definitions and configurations corresponding to one or more hosts; transmitting from the group manager to the remote server a command to initiate a group controller residing on the remote server; and at the remote server, initiating the one or more hosts in response to and at the direction of the group controller.