This situation occurs when we execute a zoneadm -z ZONENAME halt command and, after it, the status of Solaris Local Zone doesn’t change from Running state to a Installed state and remaining in Shutting_down state.
To solve this problem, try one or more of following commands at Global Zone until the zone state changes to Installed:
# ps -fz ZONENAME
# zoneadm -z ZONENAME unmount -f
# zoneadm -z ZONENAME reboot — -s
# pkill -9 -z ZONENAME
After the first command, kill the listed processes of ps command.
It after these commands the zone stills in shutting_down or down states, a reboot of Global Zone should be necessary.