In a virtualization environment, there is often a need for an application to access different resources (e.g., files, configuration settings, etc.) on a computer by name. The needed resources can potentially come from any one of a plurality of discrete namespaces or containers of resources on the computer. A resource name can identify one resource in one namespace and another resource in another namespace, and the namespaces may have different precedence relative to one another. The resources needed by the application can be accessed by enumerating names in a logical merger of the namespaces such that as new names in the logical merger are needed they are dynamically chosen from among the namespaces. When two resources in different namespaces have a same name, the resource in the higher precedence namespace can be chosen.