Examples described herein include systems and methods for prioritizing workloads, such as virtual machines, to enforce quality of service (“QoS”) requirements. An administrator can assign profiles to workloads, the profiles representing different QoS categories. The profiles can extend scheduling primitives that can determine how a distributed resource scheduler (“DRS”) acts on workloads during various workflows. The scheduling primitives can be used to prioritize workload placement, determine whether to migrate a workload during load balancing, and determine an action to take during host maintenance. The DRS can also use the profile to determine which resources at the host to allocate to the workload, distributing higher portions to workloads with higher QoS profiles. Further, the DRS can factor in the profiles in determining total workload demand, leading to more efficient scaling of the cluster.