Perry Whittle (8/7/2014)
If you plan a failover, always stop your application services first. Why intentionally rip the database from under the app when you could have a clean shutdown and startup. The end user experience will also be maintained too.Any unplanned failovers should have been done during your operational acceptance testing phase.
Thanks for your comment Perry.
A bit of background, I did up a document of how each of the applications responded to a cluster failover, and middle management was happy with that given the time of the failover being done. It's done early morning when there is little or no use of the applications so OS patching and other similar activities can be done during the day.
However the management level above that are now asking why we aren't stopping the application services. That was what prompted me to ask what others are doing.