SQL SERVER 2014 FCI Cluster taking too long to failover
The issue appears to be centered around shutting down the SQL instance prior to the failover.


You are correct, because that's exactly what is happening. You're shutting it down nicely on one node, moving resources, and starting it up on another node. The question actually doesn't have anything to do with clustering but with speeding up a clean SQL Server shutdown.


  When a manual failover is performed, we do the following to speed things up to this point.


When SQL Server cleanly shuts down, it flushes all of the buffers and asks internal systems to shut themselves down.

So, how do you make this faster? First, this is only really the case when you are cleanly shutting down - which most likely won't happen during a real failure. Secondly, you don't let SQL Server shut down - I would look into using Availability Groups and testing your manual failover times to compare and contrast the differences.

Additionally, no matter what you use, indirect checkpoints are much more effective than traditional.