Is it "OK" to use a low end NIC for a dedicated heart beat between two servers?

I've got nice big server-grade NICs on my servers busy interfaces. Soon I'll be setting up a cluster that will have a dedicated heat-beat.

Do I really need to use an expensive server grade NIC for this? Or will a low-end desktop NIC suffice?

Solution 1:

Will it work? Yes.

Will the driver drag down the network performance of the whole server? Maybe. In my testing, quality server type NIC's (typically four porters) had a much lower kernel interrupt rate than the cheap consumer NICs.

You have to realize how miserable the drivers are for most chip-of-the-day cheap consumer NIC's. If you are fortunate, it won't drag down the whole system, or occasionally get in a loop and freeze up.

If you go this route, at least pick a discrete NIC with a good chip on it and good driver support, such as Intel.

Solution 2:

The quantity of traffic will be low. So no, it probably doesn't matter if they're not "Intel Server Adapters" capable of pushing wirespeed with ToE. They will need to be absolutely reliable to prevent false-positives though. So don't skimp on the chipset brand and associated drivers.

Solution 3:

Surely you'd have on-board NICs you'd use for this? I'm sure I've not seen a discrete NIC ina server for years.

I can understand using big discrete NICs for data as an upgrade

But yes, as long as they are reliable.