1. A system comprising: a processor; and a hypervisor comprising a program of executable instructions embodied in non-transitory computer-readable media accessible to the processor, and configured to, when read and executed by the processor: instantiate one or more virtual machines to execute on the hypervisor; maintain a virtual machine dependency map having one or more entries, each entry setting forth a target virtual machine and one or more virtual machines to which the target virtual machine is dependent; and determine whether to power on a target virtual machine based on information set forth in the virtual machine dependency map.