Solaris 10 zone won't plumb up virtual IPs

Recently unix team rebooted Solaris 10 zones and the zones wouldn't come up. This was tracked down to /etc/hostname* files :

$ ls -ltr /etc/hostname*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9 Oct 15 10:41 /etc/hostname.nxge3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9 Jan 19 10:44 /etc/hostname.nxge3:1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9 Jan 20 16:21 /etc/hostname.nxge3:2

$ cat /etc/hostname.nxge3
server1

$ cat /etc/hostname.nxge3
vip1

$ cat /etc/hostname.nxge3
vip2

The first file without a colon is the physical name of the zone. The :1 and :2 are virtual names for the server. These files contain only the hostname without domainname. Unless you have corresponding entry for these virtual hostnames in /etc/hosts the zone will not plumb up the virtual IPs. As per our example above these entries need to be present in the /etc/hosts file:

192.168.7.1 server1.justanexample.com
192.168.7.1 vip1.justanexample.com
192.168.7.1 vip2.justanexample.com