There are a number of considerations when using Live Upgrade on a system with zones installed. It is critical to avoid zone state transitions during lucreate and lumount operations.
When you use the lucreate command to produce an alternate boot environment (ABE), if a given zone is not running, then the zone cannot be booted until the lucreate has completed.
When you use the lucreate command to produce an ABE, if a given zone is running, it should not be halted or rebooted until the lucreate has completed.
When an ABE is mounted by lumount, you cannot boot zones or reboot them, although zones that were running before the lumount operation can continue to run.
Because a non-global zone can be controlled by a non-global zone administrator as well as by the global zone administrator, it is best to halt all zones during lucreate or lumount operations.
When Live Upgrade operations are underway, non-global zone administrator involvement is critical. The upgrade affects the work of the administrators, who will be addressing the changes that occur as a result of the upgrade. Zone administrators should ensure that any local packages are stable throughout the sequence, handle any post-upgrade tasks such as configuration file adjustments, and generally schedule around the system outage.