How to Boot a Zone

Booting a zone places the zone in the running state. A zone can be booted from the ready state or from the installed state. A zone in the installed state that is booted transparently transitions through the ready state to the running state. Zone login is allowed for zones in the running state.

Note that you perform the internal zone configuration when you log in to the zone for the first time. This is described in Internal Zone Configuration.

If you plan to use an /etc/sysidcfg file to perform initial zone configuration, as described in How to Use an /etc/sysidcfg File to Perform the Initial Zone Configuration, create the sysidcfg file and place it the zone's /etc directory before you boot the zone.

You must be the global administrator in the global zone to perform this procedure.

1. Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.

   To create the role and assign the role to a user, see Using the Solaris Management Tools With RBAC (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

2. Use the zoneadm command with the -z option, the name of the zone, which is my-zone, and the boot subcommand to boot the zone.

   global# zoneadm -z my-zone boot

3. When the boot completes, use the list subcommand with the -v option to verify the status.

   global# zoneadm list -v

   You will see a display that is similar to the following:

   ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / native shared 1 my-zone running /export/home/my-zone native shared

Example 20–2 Specifying Boot Arguments for Zones

Boot a zone using the -m verbose option:

global# zoneadm -z my-zone boot -- -m verbose

Reboot a zone using the -m verbose boot option:

global# zoneadm -z my-zone reboot -- -m verbose

Zone administrator reboot of the zone my-zone, using the -m verbose option:

my-zone# reboot -- -m verbose

Troubleshooting

If a message indicating that the system was unable to find the netmask to be used for the IP address specified in the zone's configuration displays, see netmasksWarning Displayed When Booting Zone. Note that the message is only a warning and the command has succeeded.