Compare Docker for Windows options

As part of Dockercon 2017, there was an announcement that Linux containers can run as hyperv container in Windows server. This announcement made me to take a deeper look  into Windows containers. I have worked mostly with Linux containers till now. In Windows, I have mostly used Docker machine or Toolbox till now. I recently tried out other methods to deploy containers in Windows. In this blog, I will cover different methods to run containers in Windows, technical internals on the methods and comparison between the methods. I have also covered Windows Docker base images and my experiences trying the different methods to run Docker containers in Windows. The 3 methods that I am covering are Docker Toolbox/Docker machine, Windows native containers, hyper-v containers.

Docker Toolbox

Docker Toolbox runs Docker engine on top of boot2docker VM image running in Virtualbox hypervisor. We can run Linux containers on top of the Docker engine. I have written few blogs(1, 2) about Docker Toolbox before. We can run Docker Toolbox on any Windows variants.

Windows Native containers

Trying out Docker in Windows

Few folks recently asked me how to try out Docker in Windows machine to get familiar with Docker and Containers. This is not the same as running Docker engine in Windows, there is some active work going on to achieve this. The easiest way to try out Docker is to use Docker Toolbox. I covered Toolbox in one of my earlier blogs. In this blog, I will provide the steps to create a simple environment to play with Docker engine, Swarm, Compose and Networking in Windows.

Pre-requisites:

• Install Docker Toolbox from here.
• Docker Toolbox 1.9 version has the following components(Docker client, Docker machine, Virtualbox, Kitematic, Compose, Git). If you already have Virtualbox and Git bash for Windows, you can skip the installation of these 2.
• In this blog, I will use Docker CLI, so Kitematic is not needed.
• I have executed commands below from git bash shell.

Following are the versions of Docker components that gets installed with Toolbox 1.9: