Solaris zone stuck in “shutting_down” state

Recently, one of the servers I manage had problems bringing down one of its non-global zones. I ran “zoneadm list -vic” and confirmed that ngzone1 was in a “shutting_down” state.


(global-zone)# zoneadm list -vic
ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
8 ngzone1 shutting_down /z/host/ngzone1 native shared
9 ngzone2 running /z/host/ngzone2 native shared


From the global zone, I fixed the problem by killing the process that was hanging up the ngzone1 zone:


(global-zone)# ps -efZ | grep ngzone1
global root 7623 1 0 May 24 ? 0:04 zoneadmd -z ngzone1
ngzone1 root 11679 1 0 May 31 ? 0:00 zsched
ngzone1 server 23527 1 0 Jun 06 ? 13:20 batchResearch1


Sending a SIGKILL to PID 23527 enabled the ngzone1 to properly shutdown. Don?t kill zoneadmd or zsched as that?s handled by the global zone. Everything else should be fair game. The only thing left now is to figure out what caused the process to hang preventing ngzone1 from properly being shut down.