1. A method for automated configuration of a set of resources for hosting a virtual machine at a particular physical computer node in a hosting system, the hosting system comprising a plurality of physical computer nodes for hosting a plurality of user-specified virtual machines, the method comprising: receiving a user-specified configuration for a first virtual machine to be created on a first set of virtual hardware resources of the particular physical computer node, wherein the user-specified configuration comprises a set of parameters for transforming a set of generic hardware resources into a specific virtual machine implementation, wherein the first set of virtual hardware resources comprises a disk storage device; partitioning the disk storage device of the first set of virtual hardware resources based on the user-specified configuration to implement a file system for the first virtual machine, the file system for storing data for the first virtual machine; and configuring the file system for the first virtual machine according to the user-specified configuration in order to create the first virtual machine on the file system, wherein the receiving, partitioning, and configuring are performed by a second virtual machine operating on a second set of virtual hardware resources of the same particular physical computer node used to host the first virtual machine, the second virtual machine to remain separate from the new user-specified first virtual machine hosted on the particular physical computer node.