A project that requires a 'heartbeat' type application

[Derrick MacPherson]

I've been asked to go ahead with a project that will require me to build
several machines, 2 of which are to be used for mysql, one being 'live'
and writeable, the other being a read only backup server. The developers
are Linux people that are used to using an application called hearbeat
that does failover, and I am wondering what I can do in freebsd that is
similiar, if my mysql live server dies, the backup server takes over. I
browsed ports but there's so much there I may be missing something. 

thanks for any input.