What should an administrator do first before shutting down two nodes of a 4-node cluster?

Migrating node-management LIFs is a good practice but is not the first required step - quorum must be protected before any LIF migration.

Moving Vserver root volumes is important for data availability but cannot be safely done until cluster quorum is secured by marking nodes ineligible first.

RDB ring mastership is automatically re-elected; manually reassigning it is not a standard or required first step in a node shutdown procedure.

Setting nodes to 'ineligible' removes them from cluster quorum voting before they go offline, ensuring the remaining two nodes can maintain a quorum majority and epsilon without triggering a split-brain scenario. This is the mandatory first step in a controlled multi-node shutdown procedure in ONTAP to preserve cluster availability.