Error: "Farm is Unavailable"; SharePoint 2010

Problem description:

The entire SharePoint staging site is not accessible.

Error messages:

“Farm is Unavailable” - while accessing the site.

While running the product configuration Wizard “Cannot open database “database name” requested by login. The login failed for the user “sa”

Steps Taken & Resolution:

1.   Checked inetmgr / IIS to see all the necessary web application are started.

2.   All the necessary SharePoint & MS SQL service are started.

3.   Restarted the WFE's & DB servers.

4.   Checked the DB server and verified the User “sa” (as mentioned in error) having access to the specified database.

5.   While checking the database, we came to know several database are in offline mode.

Steps to check database is in offline or online:

1.   You will not be seeing + sign to expand the database.

2.   To confirm it is in offline, right click on the database & click on properties.

3.   In property window, Status as blank and size, space available as “Unavailable”. It confirms DB is in offline mode.

To make it online, select the database, click on “New Query” and execute the following query.

alter database [“DATABASE-NAME”]

set online

Example:
alter database [Sharepoint2010_DB]
set online

We ran the query for all the DB which was in offline. Then ran the product configuration wizard and it was successful.

Now all the sites are accessible!!!  :)

Root Cause Analysis: Several DB’s went offline because “huge amount of Log shipping data has been generated for the past 2 months and disk space crossed its threshold”. Later we identified our staging site FAST search server continuously crawling for more than 1000 hours and it never seems like stopping. This happened because “FAST Search server certificate “got expired 3 months back.

We stopped the crawling manually and renewed the fast search certificate .Also we have done shrinking of the log shipping data as well.

That’s it... & it’s all set now.

Note: If you find a different solution, please report it as a comment to this post. Be sure to double-verify it: undo your solution and verify that the problem comes back, then redo it and verify that the problem goes away.