It would be useful for VM's to have a "booting" state in which a VM can stay a configurable amount of seconds after being started, and during which time Actors are not started. There is a paper (http://hal.univ-nantes.fr/hal-01586932v1) that even talks about Boot time modeling, which of course would be great to use for a real model instead of just some configurable delay.

Currently, we know of SimGrid users who play a "trick" by setting the host's speed to 0 flops for some number of seconds to enforce some "do nothing while booting" behavior, which is not only not very clean but also problematic if actors on that VM have been started and don't call execute() (in which case they don't care about flop/sec being zero).