An apparatus, program product and method monitor the state of a cache during a cache preload operation in a clustered computer system such that the monitored state can be used after a failover to potentially avoid the need to restart the cache preload operation from the beginning. In particular, by monitoring the state of the cache during a cache preload operation, any data that has been preloaded into a cache prior to a failure may be retained after a failover occurs, thus enabling the cache preload operation to continue from the point at which it was interrupted as a result of the failure.