An aspect of the present invention facilitates selecting suitable nodes to host virtual machines (VMs) in an environment containing a large number of nodes (such as a grid). In one embodiment, information indicating corresponding resources available in each machine node (a node capable of hosting VMs) in the grid is maintained distributed over a set of management nodes contained in the grid. On receiving an indication that a VM requiring a set of resources is sought to be hosted, a machine node having available the set of resources is identified based on the distributed information. The VM is then provisioned/hosted on the identified machine node. The maintenance of the resource availability information distributed across multiple management nodes enables the solution to be scaled for use in environments having a large number of nodes.