Automated network isolation for providing non-disruptive disaster recovery testing of multi-tier applications spanning physical and virtual hosts

Abstract

Various systems, methods and apparatuses for creating network isolation spanning physical and virtual hosts are presented. In one embodiment, network isolation may be created between a primary (e.g., production) site and a secondary (e.g., a disaster recovery or sandbox) site. The network isolation allows testing (or other uses) on the secondary site to be non-disruptive to the normal operations of the sites, including the ability to failover during testing. Such non-disruptive network isolation allows certain communications to continue, especially communications between ports having replicated data. The network isolation may be customized in various other ways to allow certain communications to continue while preventing other communications. This invention can be used to validate application readiness, as well as to validate data correctness of individual tiers, and may be used with systems that contain multiple tiers, and include physical hosts, virtual hosts, and/or combinations of both.