There is a feature in MOSS that enables you to gradually shut down the farm for maintenance.  This feature is called "Quiescing."  I have to admit, this isn't a word I use everyday, so I looked it up on Dictionary.com and found the following:

"become quiet or quieter"

"To render quiescent, i.e. temporarily inactive or disabled. For example to quiesce a device (such as a digital modem). It is also a system command in MAX TNT software which is used to temporarily disable a modem or DS0 channel."

Here is how Microsoft spins it:

"Quiescing is the process of gradually bringing long-running applications of a resource offline without incurring data loss. It has been introduced in Microsoft Office servers for 2007."

So if you need to perform maintenance on a farm, you "quiesce" it. IMHO, something like "Take Farm Offline" would have been a better choice.

Why should you use the quiesce feature?

Simply put, to prevent data loss.

How do you quiesce the farm?

1. From Central Administration, Operations, select "Quiesce Farm."

2. Enter the number of minutes in which you want the farm to be fully quiesced and click "Start Quiescing."

3. The page will display the quiescing status.  [From Microsoft] "Quiescing has three states: normal, quiescing, and quiesced. Normal is the active state in which the farm handles all requests that come into it. Quiescing is the state in which the farm only handles requests from existing sessions, and quiesced is the state in which the farm does not allow any new sessions to start."

How do you "un-quiesce" (reset) a farm:

1. From Central Administration, Operations, select "Quiesce Farm."

2. Click "Reset Farm."  Why couldn't they have come up with an obscure word for "reset?"

What quiescing doesn't do.

I expected that after quiescing a farm I'd see a page saying something like "This site is down for maintenance" when accessing a site collection.  It doesn't do that.  I found this information useful: 

[From Microsoft] "Not all applications and services use quiescing. Many other features and operations do not need to use quiescing because they do not have long-running sessions where users enter data over multiple server requests without saving information. For instance, when a user edits an item in a SharePoint list, the information is saved to the database in a single transaction."

[From Microsoft] "In InfoPath Forms Services, a form-filling session may require several communications with a server as the form posts back for server-side data processing for operations such as view switching. Data from the session is usually not saved until the very end when a user submits or saves the form that they’re filling. If an administrator were to take the farm offline while some users were in the process of filling forms out, the users would lose all of the data accumulated so far in their session."

To summarize, there are 2 ways to use quiescing.  The first is to impress your friends.  Casually slip the word into a conversation and watch their expression.  The second way to use quiescing is to perform maintenance on your farm and prevent data loss (the key benefit of using this feature).

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Posted 07-13-2007 9:49 AM by John Powell, PMP, MCPD, MCSD