Riverbed CX-770s were never meant to be hypervisors, but who doesn’t love repurposing enterprise gear for homelab greatness? These boxes, built for WAN optimization and SteelFusion roles, have decent horsepower under the hood—and with a bit of elbow grease, they make solid nodes for a Proxmox VE Ceph cluster.

In this post, I’ll walk you through converting three CX-770s into a self-contained 3-node Proxmox Ceph cluster. It’s perfect for testing distributed storage, learning HA features, and flexing some homelab muscle.

Hardware Overview: Riverbed CX-770

Specs will vary slightly based on model/refresh, but here’s the general idea:

CPU: Intel Xeon (E3-1200v2 range – decent for Ceph)

RAM: Usually 32GB Non-ECC DDR3 (4x8G max configuration)

Storage:

2 internal 2.5" drive bays (SATA)

1x PCIe slot (for NIC/HBA upgrades if needed)

Network: Dual + quad gigabit NICs onboard (so 6 in total)