Your organization operates a three-node failover cluster that provides a highly available file service. During the next maintenance window you must install critical OS security updates without breaching the SLA, which allows only brief failovers but no prolonged service interruption. According to recommended proper patching procedures for clustered servers, which approach should you take?
Patch the passive nodes now but delay patching the active node until the next window to avoid any failover events.
Pause (drain) one node, move its clustered roles to other nodes, patch and reboot the node, resume it, then repeat for the remaining nodes.
Evict every node from the cluster, apply patches while the cluster is offline, and recreate the cluster once all nodes are updated.
Disable the cluster heartbeat on all nodes, install the patches on every node simultaneously, then re-enable the heartbeat after all servers restart.
Rolling (sequential) patching keeps the service available because only one cluster node is taken out of rotation at a time. The administrator pauses or drains the first node so that its clustered roles move to healthy peers, installs the updates, reboots the node, and then resumes it. After the node rejoins the cluster, the same steps are repeated for the next node until every member is patched. This method is built into tools such as Windows Cluster-Aware Updating and is also the preferred "Rolling Updates" process documented for Red Hat clusters. The other choices either force a full-cluster outage, break quorum, or leave the active node unpatched-none of which meets the high-availability or security requirements.
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