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[Absolute-Zero Profile]

Okay, here's a good one for you. I'm not sure how many of you use, or are heavily involved with, virtualisation technologies but I've got an interesting task I'd like to achieve.

We have a data centre with a number of Windows based servers. Each one of these servers has a VM clone of itself, created using VMWare Converter. These clone images are taken regularly to ensure that we have a viable, quick recovery situation in the event of a catastrophic failure.

At present, if a physical machine fails we have to manually login to the VMWare server, fire up the machine's clone and activate the NIC, thus putting it live on the network.

I'd like to know if anyone has, or knows of, a script that can be used to automatically start the VM clone and modify the settings for the NIC if the physical server stops responding to network requests for a specified period of time. It can't happen instantly in case the problem was merely a brief interruption in network communications, rather than a server fail over situation. Ideally, I'd then like the same script to deactivate the NIC and shut the VM clone down again once the physical server has been restarted. This would need to be fairly instantaneous.

Obviously the script would have to monitor some kind of 'heartbeat' signal on the physical server in order for it to respond once it notices the heartbeat has stopped. Ping isn't an option because, once the VM clone becomes live, it'll start responding to ICMP Echo requests to IPs that were previously being served by the physical machine. Checking the availability of the physical server's MAC address is an option but one I'm not sure about.

The main problem I can see with such a situation would be that, for a brief period, both the physical and VM clone machines would be trying to use the same IPs on the same subnet once the physical machine came back online.

Any heard of such a utility or know of any way this can be accomplished?