A method, system, and computer program product for upgrade procedures in high-availability clustered systems. The method selects fail-over nodes during rolling patch installation and comprises steps for identifying a first node to upgrade, migrating services of the first node to a second node and shutting down the first node to perform its upgrade, then migrating the services back from the second node to the first node. When performing an upgrade of the other nodes of the cluster (e.g., nodes of the cluster other than the first node), rather than migrating the services of the node to be upgraded to another node that still needs to be upgraded, instead migrate the services of the node to be upgraded to a node that has already been upgraded. This reduces the brown-out time at least to the extent that this method incurs only one migration per node rather than two migrations per node.