Zoneadm Shut down command not responding

 You’ve run “zoneadm -z zonename shutdown”. It hasn’t quite shut down, and is stuck in the shutting_down state. What can you do to fix it?

Well, sometimes some processes don’t die in a timely fashion. Check what processes are running with the following command:

# ps -fz zonename

If any processes other than zsched are running, kill -9 them. The zone should hopefully shut down.

If it doesn’t, and you’re left with zsched as the only remaining process, then potentially you’ve hit a bug, such as bug 6272846 - "User orders zone death; NFS client thumbs nose". This bug has been outstanding since May 2005, so don’t expect a fix any time soon.

Thankfully there are a few more things you can try to kill the damn zone off. Give some of the following a go:

# zoneadm -z zonename unmount -f
# zoneadm -z zonename reboot -- -s
# pkill -9 -z zonename