# Containers / Nodes / Virtual Machines

In relation to Instances, an Instance can have many nodes. A node is a generic representation of a container or a virtual machine. In most cases, VM Essentials will represent a node as a Container or Virtual Machine depending on the provisioning engine used for the Instance (workload provisioned to a HVM cluster as opposed to a Docker cluster, for example). Node is just a generic naming representation when referring to these types of items. The public VM Essentials developer API, however, often refers to both virtual machines and Docker containers as “containers”. The UI was updated to better delineate this concept for easier understanding but, in essence, the name is valid for both concepts of containerized environments as well as virtual machines.
