I have purchased 2x IVC-32 cards for my ECS / EHX  matrix. One of them is used as spare card in case the main card fails. The spare card is kept on the shelf and is hot swapped into the matrix if the main card fails. When I put the spare card into the same slot as the main card then my IP panels do not reconnect. 

Answer: All Clear-Com matrix cards are hot swap-able and by putting a spare IVC-32 card in to the matrix to replace a faulty card has been tested to work. The spare card will receive a copy of the configuration settings from the CPU card.
(note: All front cards are hot pluggable / hot patchable . However when inserting them into the frame they may reset the frame so caution is advised)

Please check with your IT administrator. Some Ethernet switches do not allow a different piece of equipment with the same IP address to be connected to the same switch port. 
a) Ethernet switches can be programmed so that each port- only allows one device per port and this is controlled by the MAC address of the device (referred to sometimes as sticky ports). So that if a device with a different MAC address is connected it will shut the Ethernet port down.  

b) once the port is shut down the eth-switch slowly learns if the connected device is another Ethernet switch or a host (end) device. The time taken to learn about the connected device can be over 30 secs before the port starts to forward data. Contact your IT administrator about Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) and PortFast settings on your Ethernet switches
If possible the Ethernet switch port that the IVC-32 card is connected to, should be set to PortFast (port fast) mode