Patent ID: 7483390

Claim:
A method of automatically transitioning a node comprising: receiving a human-readable description of a transition for the node, the human-readable description having a standardized syntax and including a subnet group section and a device section; selecting one or more network components from a list of network components based on resources of the selected components and the description of the transition of the node, wherein selecting one or more network components includes referencing the list of network components, creating a first virtual map of an existing network in volatile memory based on the referenced list of network components, and populating a second virtual map of another network in volatile memory with network components from the referenced list based on the description of transitioning the node; and configuring at least one of the selected network components based on a resource of the selected component and the description of the transition of the node, wherein the at least one of the selected network components has an associated network resource wrapper to provide a machine accessible and standardized description of the functionality of the at least one of the selected network components, wherein configuring the at least one of the selected network components includes programmatically altering the associated network resource wrapper.