In most cases, there is nothing you need to do for DHCPv6 client startup. The in.ndpd daemon starts up DHCPv6 automatically when it is needed.
For DHCPv4, however, you must request the client startup, if that was not done during Oracle Solaris installation. See How to Enable a DHCP Client.
The dhcpagent daemon obtains configuration information that is needed by other processes involved in booting the system. For this reason, the system startup scripts start dhcpagent early in the boot process and wait until the network configuration information from the DHCP server arrives.
Although the default is to run DHCPv6, you can choose to not have DHCPv6 run. After DHCPv6 starts running, you can stop it with the ipadm delete-addr command. You can also disable DHCPv6 so that it does not start on reboot, by modifying the /etc/inet/ndpd.conf file.
The following example show how to immediately shut down DHCPv6:
ex# echo ifdefault StatefulAddrConf false >> /etc/inet/ndpd.conf ex# pkill -HUP -x in.ndpd ex# ipadm delete-addr -r dhcp-addrobj
At startup, if persistent DHCP configurations exist in the system, then the dhcpagent is started as part of the startup script processes. The dhcpagent then configures the network interfaces as described in How DHCP Works.