1. A computer-implemented method for performing data de-duplication for one or more virtual machines in a virtualization environment, comprising: configuring the virtualization environment to perform de-duplication; in response to one or more write requests from the one or more virtual machines to write data to one or more virtual disks: generating one or more fingerprints corresponding to the data to be written; and writing the data to one or more persistent storage devices associated with the one or more virtual disks, wherein the data is written regardless of whether or not the one or more storage devices already contains data corresponding to fingerprints matching the one or more generated fingerprints and whether the virtualization environment is configured to perform de-deduplication, such that data on the one or more storage devices is not de-duplicated in response to or near a time of the one or more write requests; in response to a read request from the one or more virtual machines to read at least a portion of the data: identifying fingerprints corresponding to the data to be read; accessing a content cache that stores a cached set of data for the one or more virtual machines and fingerprints corresponding to the cached set of data, wherein the content cache is configured such that it does not store more than one copy of data corresponding to a particular fingerprint; determining if any of the identified fingerprints corresponding to the requested portion of data match any of the fingerprints corresponding to the cached set of data; and if a match is found, retrieving data corresponding to the matched fingerprints from the cached set of data; and at a later time, performing de-duplication on the one or more storage devices, such that that the one or more storage devices do not store more than a specified number of copies of data corresponding to a particular fingerprint, wherein the specified number is associated with a replication factor, and wherein the de-duplication is not performed in response to a particular write request.