The upcoming vCenter Server Heartbeat will be announced on Feb 24.
SearchServerVirtualization is reporting that the new module will implement a hot-standby achitecture, monitoring sever and network hardware, as well as the vCenter application instance itself.
Hearbeat can either restart the application or fail-over it through LAN or WAN.
Heartbeat is not developed by VMware. The name of the partner that is providing this solution will be unveiled at VMworld.
Whoever is the partner (SSV speculates on NeverFail Group) it only supports Windows installations and uses Microsoft SQL Sever as backend database.