Repurposed/Recycled Citrix SD WAN Appliance

 I recently got three of these Citrix CB-140 SD WAN devices to recycle but I decided to play with them a bit first.  Open the hood and a SuperMicro motherboard is in there!  It has a mSATA slot, the smallest SATA SSD drive I have ever seen, it literally is a thumbnail sized circuit board that plugs into a SATA port with two small power leads.  Then a 16gb USB drive plugged into the USB header.  Six total SATA ports.  8gb of unregistered ECC RAM.  Seven 1gbps RJ45 network ports plus remote management. A quad core Intel Atom C2558 CPU @ 2.4ghz.  Room for two 3.5" hard drives. 

I upgraded the RAM to 16gb erased both drives, verified that the NICs actually work (those white chips are physical switches for detecting LAN cable disconnects, I had issues with those back on some older RiverBed appliances.  I then was able to install both Windows 10 and then VMware ESXi v6.7.

I will probably end up selling these. Even though they are a tad bit too noisy to be in the living room as a media player; they would be a pretty energy efficient VMware server, Plex Server, FreeNAS, or PFSense Firewall.



The thumbnail sized SSD drive plugged directly into the SATA port.