Solaris local zone not booting "zoneadm: zone 'zone_name': call to zoneadmd failed"

Hello Friends,

In this post, I will explain you the one important issue which we generally facing while we boot the local Solaris zone on the Sun Solaris operating system.

When you are trying to boot the local zone from your Global zone, you encounter the below error message as mentioned below.

Error: zoneadm: zone 'sunz1': "/usr/lib/fs/zfs/mount das/sunz1/export /zones/sunz1/root/export" failed with exit code 1
zoneadm: zone 'sunz1': call to zoneadmd failed.

Solution: For such type of issue is normally related to NFS. When you boot the server, it will start NFS service before start zones. so, as NFS is started, FS /zones/sunz1/root/export  is already in use so global zone doesn't want to start a zone with a FS already in use by a process. You can check which file system is mounted on your global zone as describe below.

sun:/> cat /etc/dfs/dfstab

#       Place share(1M) commands here for automatic execution
#       on entering init state 3.
#
#       Issue the command 'svcadm enable network/nfs/server' to
#       run the NFS daemon processes and the share commands, after adding
#       the very first entry to this file.
#
#       share [-F fstype] [ -o options] [-d "<text>"] <pathname> [resource]
#       .e.g,
#       share  -F nfs  -o rw=engineering  -d "home dirs"  /export/home
share -F nfs -o rw=sun.vibhor.com:sunz1.vibhor.com /zones/sunz2/root/export

In above output you can see one folder is NFS mounted on the two local zone.

2. Now for resolving the issue , please stop the NFS service, boot the zone and restart the service.

sun:/> svcs status nfs/server
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online          5:13:30 svc:/network/nfs/status:default
online          5:13:36 svc:/network/nfs/server:default

Currently NFS server service is online on the Global zone, so using below command we will disable the service.

sun:/> svcadm disable nfs/server

sun:/> svcs status nfs/server
STATE          STIME    FMRI
disabled        5:21:57 svc:/network/nfs/server:default
online          5:13:30 svc:/network/nfs/status:default

3. Now we will boot the local zone again and see the existing error occur or not.

sun:/> zoneadm -z sunz1 boot

Note: Now your local zone is boot without any error. So normally this problem occur when NFS is mounted on the server.

4. Once the issue has been resolved you may enable the NFS server services.

sun:/> svcadm enable nfs/server

sun:/> svcadm restart nfs/server

If you see the my screen output images the whole method is describe step by step. If you facing still issue please comment on this post.