The activation task ( and potentially the patching task ) may fail if the proxy server is not specified on the compute nodes. The activation task and the patching task may need to contact a server in the cloud for which they need a proxy server.
to set this explicitly you can use the netsh command.
to see if the proxy server is set,
clusrun netsh winhttp show proxy
to set the proxy server name explicitly
clusrun netsh winhttp set proxy http://<proxy server name>:<port>
thanks
-parmita