&gt; As would the VM&#x27;s you said you ran previously.<p>&gt; (though you did earlier complain about having to patch everything in isolation :P)<p>The problem wasn&#x27;t so much that the zones needed to be patched, the problem was that they were full installs of solaris.  Solaris didn&#x27;t really have a concept of a &#x27;base install&#x27;, at least not without a ton of debugging and manual dependency management [0].  This meant that the only easy way to install a working solaris system was to all the packages [1].  This meant that you then needed to patch all the packages.<p>I think some of that got better in solaris 11(?), but I never made it that far.  I think I switched to nexenta and then to debian&#x2F;kfreebsd.<p>[0] I tried a minimal install, I got the kernel to panic by trying to enable nfs4+krb5p without having some separately packaged crypto kernel modules installed.<p>[1] Unless you were a solaris admin. The ones I asked said it was possible, but that I should just install everything.