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Nowadays Telecommunication Infrastructure feels growing demand of consumers for high performance due to changed character of traffic and increasing number of subscribers. That led to development of powerful platforms with integrated high availability features provided by all elements and network interfaces redundancy and fast recovery mechanisms.
The Operation Systems running on such platform have incorporated mechanism to use mentioned hardware features in order to provide switching application and traffic from one element to another and organize recovery in case of failure or planned update or maintenance.
For that combination of complicated Hardware and Software platforms whose proper operation is in many cases critical (e.g. for public safety domain area) there are strong requirements for factory and acceptance testing before system is actually set up and running in real environment.
Currently many aspects of HW and SW architecture are being standardized and commonly used. For example Service Availability Forum organization has applied a lot of community efforts to provide Carrier Grade requirements for Linux that should satisfy today`s demand of manufacturers of hardware and software.  Another example is widely used is Intellectual Platform Management Interface (IPMI) that became a standard and for which Open Source community has provided OpenIPMI library allowing to access IPMI functions. The list of these available and popular standards can be really long.
This paper provides an overview of the Approach to Acceptance testing from the perspective of an existing up-to-date HW and SW standards and development tools. Special attention is paid to typical requirements for acceptance testing systems that should be taken into account to make the solution widely applied. Besides that there are considered several typical difficulties in design of Acceptance Testing Environment such as providing necessary traffic load, collecting and synchronizing tests running results, performing remote access to system being tested through complicated topology network, automated redundancy testing, etc. In addition paper contains existing architecture solutions for problems just mentioned.
The target audiences for this paper are people with interest to Carrier Grade platforms and applications development and testing.