I have a 2008R2 domain with (2)2008R2 nodes in a cluster. I have 2 questions

1. If I "validate the cluster" and it is a cluster with several 10TB disk on it, etc. will it take a long time to validate?  Just want to make sure that step does not cause any issues on a running cluster in production

2. When a node reboots for Windows updates, the cluster does a good job on continuing to ping, but it is basically offline for about 7 minutes.  Is there something I can do to speed up the failover process?

T

Scalability in failover clusters is typically achieved by scaling up, or adding more capability, to an individual server within the cluster. It is important to understand that a failover cluster must be designed to handle the expected load and that individual servers should be sized so that they can accommodate expected growth in CPU, memory, and disk usage.

 network switches that can support the IP address transfer. If your systems infrastructure cannot support this, you may want to use a load-balanced cluster instead of a failover cluster.