SharePoint 2010 Farm Shutdown Procedure

Question

What is the recommended procedure for shutting down a SharePoint 2010 Farm? In other words, after I have quiesced the farm, what additional steps do I need to take to ensure that there is NO SharePoint-related activity on the farm? I know how to quiesce the farm, and how to stop the SharePoint services via the Windows Services on a single-server installation, but I am trying to determine how best to shut down all the SharePoint services across a medium-sized farm with multiple WFEs, multiple app servers, and multiple database servers.

Answer 1

If you want to completely stop a SharePoint farm there is a useful list of services within the Move all databases (SharePoint Foundation 2010) article.

Obviously (as you have requested) this will mean that ALL SharePoint activity will cease:

"To stop the farm On the server that is running the Central Administration Web site, in the Services snap-in, stop the following services:

SharePoint 2010 Administration

SharePoint 2010 Timer

SharePoint 2010 Tracing

SharePoint 2010 User Code Host

SharePoint 2010 VSS Writer

SharePoint Foundation Search V4

World Wide Web Publishing Service

On the server that is running the Central Administration Web site, at the command prompt, type iisreset /stop."

Answer 2

What is it that you hope to accomplish by taking SharePoint offline?

Quiescing the farm will prevent SharePoint from serving end-users so you can install features and so forth.

Stopping the services goes another step beyond that. In fact, you will not be able to install features if all of the SharePoint services have been stopped.

The procedure is the same when there are multiple servers. You would just need to stop the services on all the machines.

Aside from shutting down the SQL Server instance and actually shutting down the Windows Servers that all your farm servers are running on, I cannot think of anything else that you would need to do.