I'm looking for options and opinions on a cost effective, multi-port (6'ish port SFP/SFP+) RFC2544/EtherSAM rack appliance that can act as the remote/loopback for our field installers' portable RFC2544/EtherSAM enabled Exfo test sets.
I came across XenaNetworks XenaCompact which looks like it would fit the bill, but I'm sure there are others (save Ixia, Exfo and Fluke, which I'm pretty much excluding by default because I imagine they are likely completely out to lunch on price relative to the extremely simplified feature set we require).
Many ethernet termination devices will support most of the features it sounds like you are looking for. No clue what price range you consider but these may work for you.
Been a couple years since I played with the EtherSAM, but I think it supports two different testing options. One where the far end is on the same subnet and one which uses L3/IP. If you are on the same LAN segment, then pretty much any switch which supports loopback should work I think. Else, devices such as the Adva FSP150 or Juniper ACX or MX (probably a bit of overkill but very multi-purpose), or several different Ciena platforms come to mind.
We have been using the VeEX UX400 platform. It has a portable and rack-mount version, we have the portable so I can't comment on the rack-mount variant. We found the price/feature set to be better than several other vendors that we evaluated. We've had the equipment for several months now and found it to perform great.
We are looking for options or opinions on a cost effective RFC2544/EtherSAM appliance we can run on a VM and/or as a Linux container on equipment being placed at the premise. See http://www.vg-labs.com/ for an explanation of the device we would like to run these appliances on.