Procedure for Shutting Down a Fully Distributed Environment?

[muebel]

Suppose you have a fully distributed environment. A search head pool, Indexer Cluster, Intermediate Forwarders, Licensing Server, Deployment Server... what is the procedure to safely shutdown every one of the servers?

[jmheaton · Accepted solution]

If your shutting it down for upgrade then this is the order we recently used:
1. Deployment Server
2. Licensing
3. Search Cluster
4. Intermediate Forwarders
5. Index Cluster

That will retain as much data as possible.