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.
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.
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.