...
After these additional steps, the direct assignment of static IPs and the unsetting of the node.cfg templates can proceed as usual. The cluster gets rebooted again once that process is completed.
When restarting an entire cluster all at once, verify that nodes that were already part of the cluster are restarted first. Once they are fully online, it is safe to boot any new nodes being added into the cluster. Booting these new nodes too early can lead to IP address conflicts, and the new nodes will fail to come online.