# Provisioning a Workload

At this point, the cluster is ready for workloads to be provisioned to it. Within the Instance provisioning wizard (See Provisioning > Instances documentation for more details on provisioning), there is now the “HVM” Instance Type. This Instance will allow you to choose from any HVM cluster-compatible images within your environment. Out of the box, VM Essentials does not include any compatible images but there is a section later in this guide covering the process of onboarding existing QCOW images into the UI as Virtual Images and another section covering the process of prepping Windows images from the downloaded ISO.

After arriving at the Configure tab of the provisioning wizard, select a Plan based on resource needs. From the **RESOURCE POOL** field, select the desired HVM cluster. When configuring **VOLUMES** for the new workload, note that space can be claimed from the configured volume. Within **NETWORKS**, we can add the new workload to one of the **VLANS** set up as part of cluster creation. Finally, note that we can choose the HOST the workload should run on in addition to selecting the compatible image.

TIP

The VOLUMES configuration within the provisioning wizard includes a flyout menu allowing storage type (standard, thin, thick (lazy zero), and thick (eager) and storage profile (cache: none or cache: directsync) configurations to be set on each individual volume.

Review and complete the provisioning wizard. After a short time, the workload should be up and running. With a workload now running on the cluster, we can take a look at some of the monitoring, migration, failover, and other actions we can take for workloads running on HVM clusters.

NOTE

HVM clusters support CPU pinning (tying specific vCPUs associated with running workloads to specific physical CPU cores). Currently, this must be done manually by accessing the appropriate HVM host and issuing `virsh` commands or editing XML. Adding UI tools to view and control CPU pinning is on the product roadmap to be added in the near future. Despite the requirement to edit CPU pinning manually, this is a supported action for workloads running on HVM clusters.
