One of the challenges with any hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is that sometimes you need to shut things down for maintenance. This normally happens to some of my customers a few times a year depending on what part of the world they live in. I thought that it would be nice to document the supported process to shut down a Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) cluster.


It is really as easy as 1-2-3 and is documented here by Microsoft: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2013/08/23/how-to-properly-shutdown-a-failover-cluster-or-a-node/ – Authored by Elden Christensen (Principal PM at Microsoft of Clustering and HA) – so you know the steps are correct

(Now I know this blog post is a bit dated and for Windows 2012 R2 … Don’t fear the steps are going to be the same for you in Windows 2016.)

Shutting Down a Cluster

Shutting down the entire cluster involves stopping all roles and then stopping the Cluster Service on all nodes.  While you can shut down each node in the cluster individually, using the cluster UI will ensure the shutdown is done gracefully.

  1. Open Failover Cluster Manager (CluAdmin.msc)
  2. Right-click on the cluster name, select ‘More Actions’, then “Shut Down Cluster…”
  3. When prompted if you are sure you want to shut down the cluster, click “Yes”


Or a single PowerShell command

Stop-Cluster

Now as a side note I will normally just shut down all of the VM’s and Cluster Roles manually prior to doing this. It takes a couple minutes longer but has always worked very well for me.

Hope this helps and happy learning,

Thanks,


Dave