When migrated to different hosts, native non-global zones can accumulate zone boot environments that are not associated with an existing global zone. A non-global zone boot environment is known as an orphaned boot environment.
If a zone boot environment that is not associated with any global zone is selected, it is cloned. This cloned boot environment will be updated and re-parented to the active global boot environment. The orphaned boot environment will continue to exist.
This section provides the following information to manage zone boot environments during zoneadm attach operations of a zone:
The options attach-last-booted-zbe and destroy-orphan-zbes can be used with the force-zbe-clone or deny-zbe-clone options.
This option destroys all zone boot environments that are not associated with any global zone.
To destroy all orphan zone boot environments during attach, use:
-x destroy-orphan-zbes
If the selected zone boot environment is associated with the currently active global zone boot environment, the selected zone boot environment is attached. This behavior can be changed by using –x force-zbe-clone.
To select a different global zone boot environment, use:
-x force-zbe-clone
By default, if either of the following are true, the selected zone boot environment is cloned and the clone is attached.
The selected zone boot environment is associated with another global zone boot environment.
The selected zone boot environment is an orphaned boot environment that is not associated with any global zone boot environment.
An attach operation that uses deny-zbe-clone fails when you try to attach an orphaned zone boot environment that is marked active on reboot. The zone boot environment must be marked inactive to use this option.
The original zone boot environment continues to exist.
To deny clone and attach, use:
-x deny-zbe-clone
Orphaned boot environments are indicated by beadm using the O flag in the active column. In the following output, solaris-0, solaris-1, and solaris-2 are orphaned.
root@t1: # beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris-0 !RO - 3.40M static 2014-01-17 15:04
solaris-1 !RO - 3.85M static 2014-02-09 18:11
solaris-2 !RO - 39.0K static 2014-02-10 04:54
solaris-3 !R - 2.19G static 2014-02-12 16:56
solaris-5 NR / 2.43G static 2014-03-20 04:38
Boot environments that are shown as orphaned can be destroyed with beadm destroy. To destroy all orphaned boot environments, use the –O with beadm destroy.
For more information on boot environments, see Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.3 Boot Environments and the beadm(1M) man page.