This paper presents an abstract model for resource management mechanisms, called Virtual Resource Tree (VRT). The VRT model is developed aiming at meeting different end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) requirements demanded by multimedia applications. Scalability plays an important role in this scenario, bringing new mandatory features for resource management, such as the distributed management of heterogeneous resources and the support for adapting the different underlying management algorithms. In addition, this paper discusses the main issues towards the definition of the VRT file system (VRT-FS). VRT-FS is a framework that shows how, with a simple and familiar design, the functionalities of the VRT model can be ported to network operating systems.