Solaris Zone in “shutting_down” state

One of the most annoying situations when administering  Solaris zones is when you try to reboot / halt a zone , the zone goes into a “shutting_down” state which is kind of a hung state where it is neither down nor up.

The only solution to get the zone out of the “shutting_down” state was to reboot the global which is not really good  because it brings down all the other local zones on the global.

On Solaris 10 10/08 (update 6) have observed that there may be a workaround for this issue.

The following are the steps that I followed from the global

zoneadm list -cv — This shows the affected local zone in “shutting_down”

ps -ef | grep zoneadmd — Find the PID for the zoneadmd corresponding to the affected zone

kill -9 PID — Kill the PID which we get from the previous command

zoneadm -z <zone> halt — Run the command to halt a zone with <zone> being affected zone name

The above command should complain about the zoneadmd for the zone being down and being restarted or something like that.

Disclaimer : This worked for me a couple of times on Update 6 but did not work for me on update 5 and below.

Hope this helps.