Wide-area distributed systems such as data sharing, computational grids, and multimedia are increasingly being deployed in a large-scale, heterogeneous and dynamic distributed environment with geographically scattered resources. However, most current resource management approaches are unable to simultaneously deal with the characteristics of such an environment. This paper presents an efficient DHT-based locality-aware resource management mechanism. Taking advantage of a DHT’s hierarchical structure, it uses a single DHT to achieve multi-resource management with low overhead. Moreover, it has high capability to handle the characteristics of distributedsystems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism in comparison with other resource management algorithms. The mechanism performs no worse than existing locality-aware approaches and exhibits high resilience to dynamism. It also reduces the overhead of the locality-aware algorithms due to the elimination of unnecessary communications by shrinking probing scope. In addition, it yields significant improvements in the efficiency of resource discovery.