Tomcat Failover High Availability (active / passive)-Collection of common programming errors
Most likely you can use windows built in failover functionality. Im not very familiar with it, but there are questions like: Windows Service automatic failover
But why do you want active/passive setup rather than two (or more) tomcats working simultaneously in a load balanced setup? IMO this is much better and possibly easier to configure.
Using tomcats session distribution any server can crash at will and no visitor notices any interruption.
You can also easily take one server out of the load balancer, perform work like upgrades, and then reenable it again.
Last but not least, when two servers are not enough to handle the load, you can add more, which i think is harder in a active/passive setup
(I would’ve just added a comment, since i dont really answer your question, but i lack points and I though I should give you this tip anyway 🙂