Sitecore running in a Windows Server Container - Part 2

Here you can find some tips and tricks I picked up while playing around with this awesome new Windows feature. You should also read Part 1 before this makes any sense :)

Host VM tweaks

• To manage the host from your workstation you can use Enter-PSSession -VMName "wscdev", more about the new PowerShell Direct feature on MSDN.

• Remove Windows Defender, totally cripples build and running images:

  Uninstall-WindowsFeature -Name Windows-Defender-Features -Restart

• To set the keyboard language to something else than en-US:

  Set-WinUserLanguageList -LanguageList da-DK

• Place the VHD on SSD for maximum disk performance, most image/container operations are very disk I/O hungry.

• Soon you will run out of disks space in the host VM (is 20 GB). Here is how to make a larger host with more space:

1. Copy ServerDatacenterCore_en-us_TP4_Container.vhd to ServerDatacenterCore_en-us_TP4_Container_Extended.vhd.
2. Use the "Edit disk" feature in Hyper-V to expand it.
3. Double-click the new expanded VHD to mount it.
4. Use "Disk Management" to re-size the OS volume.
5. Use "Explorer" to eject the mounted VHD.
6. Use VhdPath parameter of New-ContainerHost.ps1 to reference the expanded VHD.

Connecting with the host VM from your workstation

1. On the host add " -H 0.0.0.0:2375" right after the first occurrence of "-b "Virtual Switch" and before the "goto" in the file "c:\ProgramData\docker\runDockerDaemon.cmd"

2. Run net stop docker and net start docker to restart the Docker daemon

3. Open the new port with: New-NetFirewallRule -Name "TCP2375" -DisplayName "TCP2375" -Protocol tcp -LocalPort 2375 -Action Allow -Enabled True

4. Now set the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to your host VM IP: $env:DOCKER_HOST = "tcp://10.20.34.227:2375"

You can now use docker.exe from you workstation!

Cleaning up

Delete all stopped containers:

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

Delete all tagged images tagged with "none":

docker rmi $(docker images -q -f dangling=true)

Other stuff

• Modifying NTFS permissions in containers does not work - Everything must run as LocalSystem...
• Please go vote on Native container support on Windows 10 so we can run containers without an extra host VM layer.