.Wrt us doing "something wrong", you are comparing apples and pears. I described one of the main reasons for the long boot times in my blog: the double-boot. When you talk about booting a virtualized image you are probably assuming that the image is already provisioned, i.e. the server already has the root filesystem sitting there and immediately starts to boot. In the cloud we measure from the time the user says "launch" after which the assigned server first needs to get a copy of the image. Also, unlike your case, this is a *generic* image from which many servers can be booted, hence the need for sysprep and a reboot, which pretty much doubles the time. This is one area where Windows lags Linux.
Thanks for the opportunity to clarify this.
