Actually we are going to implement the virtual IP address setup but only for the first stages of the porting
it is a more difficult have a virtual IP address setup in a large system with many servers
it requires many components to be setup and monitored having simple failover mechanics at JDBC driver level will simplify many aspects of the problem
we could use something like ha-jdbc but s too much complex for our needs (and its impact on performances for us is not justified)
IMHO a JDBC driver shouldn't include the complexity of managing failover - there's plenty of existing solutions for that, including one that you mentioned.
