An infrastructure including a cluster-global dispenser that evaluates resource consume requests against cluster-global resource management policies facilitates flexible and extensible monitoring and/or control of resource consumption for multiple and/or multi-component applications on a cluster of interconnected computers. Such an infrastructure facilitates application of comprehensive resource management to cluster computing, and compatibility with the level of abstraction offered by modern object-oriented languages. Such an infrastructure also maintains backwards-compatibility. Building on the foundation of a well-defined isolated component, the resulting resource management framework is capable of supporting a rich collection of resources and of defining policies. The notion of a cluster-global resource naturally captures the aggregation of node-local resource. This applies the familiar “single system image” attribute of cluster systems to the area of resource management. The ability to associate the multiple components (isolates) of a distributed application with a single resource domain (policy), dramatically simplifies resource accounting for cluster applications.