========================= Shutdown Clusters Cleanly

In cases where you need to physically move hardware, or you have no other choice you will need to shut down your cluster in a safe manner.

Before you begin

Confirm no applications are running that are using the cluster as backend storage.

Procedure

On each node, in parallel:

#. Run the command :doc:nodetool drain </operating-scylla/nodetool-commands/drain/>. #. Validate that the drain procedure has completed by running :doc:nodetool status </operating-scylla/nodetool-commands/status/>. If the node's status is listed as DN, then the drain command has been executed successfully. #. Stop the node after drain completed successfully.

.. include:: /rst_include/scylla-commands-stop-index.rst

#. To start the nodes again safely, proceed to the :doc:Start Clusters Cleanly <safe-start> procedure.