Server 2016 Containers on Windows 10

Windows Server 2016 was just released at Ignite 2016!

There is a lot to talk about, but the most exciting news is that Server Core images can now run on Windows 10. While there are still many reasons to migrate as fast as possible to non-Windows platforms, this is great news for those of us that still maintain legacy software running on Windows Server systems.

Here is a good overview by Stefan Scherer on his blog. I do have a few more details to add about the Windows 10 support:

  • There doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of containers you can run on Windows 10. This is great, as Hyper-V containers (how Windows 10 runs containers) are limited to only 2 instances on Server unless you buy the expensive 'Datacenter Edition'.
  • The latest microsoft/windowsservercore image runs on Windows 10. Before now, only the microsoft/nanoserver image was able to run.
  • If you've tried getting Windows Containers to run on Windows 10 before now, you may run into issues. I had an issue with Hyper-V network adapters being completely broken, and nothing except re-installing windows was able to get it to work for me.

Base Images

Base images have had some issues during the tech preview period, and I hope that things are more stable going forward. Unlike base images for *nix containers, only Microsoft has the ability to provide base images for Windows Containers. We already had things completely break due to expired certificates in the base images in early August (see Fix For Container Start Failures: Update Windows Container base OS images). It makes me nervous about running production code on these images.

Going Forward

I'm looking forward to Windows Containers being stabilized and more generally available. There are already some dev environment workflows that could be extremely valuable in the near future. The Microsoft build/development ecosystem is a complete disaster that would require a whole series of posts (15GB minimum install for build tools only officially supported on GUI SKUs just to start), but containers combined with the Visual Studio 15 install changes could bring us into a much more manageable state over the next year or so.