An intra-operating system isolation mechanism called a silo provides for the grouping and isolation of processes running on a single computer using a single instance of the operating system. The operating system enables the controlled sharing of resources by providing a view of a system name space to processes executing within an isolated application called a server silo. A server silo is created by performing a separate “mini-boot” of user-level services within the server silo. The single OS image serving the computer employs the mechanism of name space containment to constrain which server silos can use which resource(s). Restricting access to resources is therefore directly based on the process or application placed in the server silo rather than who is running the application because if a process or application is unable to resolve a name used to access a resource, it will be unable to use the resource.