Big IP FQDN Pool Member Resolution from /etc/hosts

I'm working on migrating our manual configuration of the Big IP virtual servers/pools to an AS3-based automation solution.  Our automation takes as input the required information to create a virtual server, pool and all our custom configuration.  The problem is that we don't want to first delete the manual configuration, we want to have both configurations running side-by-side so we can test.  We have been able to assign a unique VIP for the new configuration but the traffic is destined for the same destination as the manual configuration.  When the automation attempts to create a new Pool object with the same members, we run into the error about duplicate nodes.

Using /etc/hosts was an attempt to create a custom FQDN that resolves to the same destination IP address of an existing node to workaround this restriction.

Hope this helps.  Thanks!