Perform a graceful shutdown of the Distributed Cache service

May 29, 2013 by Manoj Malireddy Leave a comment

In a SharePoint Server 2013 farm, a cache cluster exists when one or more cache hosts run the Distributed Cache service. In a SharePoint Server 2013 farm, one cache exists, and the cache spans the cache cluster. An administrator can take a cache host out of the cluster to perform operational or maintenance tasks on the server, such as applying updates to the server. To prevent data loss associated with the removal of the cache host from the cache cluster, an administrator must first run the graceful shutdown procedure before removing the cache host from the cache cluster. The graceful shutdown procedure is run on the cache host being removed from the cache cluster. This cache host stores a portion of the cached data. The graceful shutdown procedure transfers all cached data from the cache host on which the graceful shutdown procedure is being run on to another cache host in the farm. The transfer process takes 15 minutes or more to run depending on how many items exist in the cache. When the transfer process is complete, removing the cache host by using the Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance cmdlet does not result in any data loss.

To perform a graceful shutdown of the Distributed Cache by using Windows PowerShell
At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, run the following command:
Stop-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance -Graceful
Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance