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Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

azure.microsoft.com

21–30 of 148 posts

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#21
post #11

Pardon the skepticism, but do "Hyper-V Containers" with "enhanced isolation powered by Hyper-V virtualization" sound suspiciously like, err, Hyper-V virtual machines? And "Server Nano" has a description rather reminiscent of 2008's "Server Core". Is this just about management tools? Because that's cool, too, but why the spin?

From the TechNet Announcement: "we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration…

Thanks for the clarification. I at first assumed they'd bring OS level virtualization, apparently I'm not the only one. But it's basically just minimal images of windows in regular VMs then...

A step in the right direction but still disappointing imo. Linux and BSD are still miles ahead.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the TechNet Announcement: "we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration…

Thanks for the clarification. I at first assumed they'd bring OS level virtualization, apparently I'm not the only one. But it's basically just minimal images of windows in regular VMs then... A step in the right direction but still disappointing imo. Linux and BSD are still miles ahead.

That referrs to Nano, not Hyper V virtualization?

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#23
post #7

This will be what takes containers into the mainstream businesses. Companies may adopt docker or other instead of this, but Microsoft creating their own version of it means its a viable technology. Im more interested in the new frameworks and technologies that get adopted because of this than the fact that its in use. Traditional Java web projects that are hosted on Tomcat/JBoss don't run well inside containers but t…

Microsoft creating their own version means the technology is viable? I think people have been using 'the technology' for years, without any input from Microsoft. It doesn't need to be anointed by Microsoft to be 'viable'.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#24
post #7

This will be what takes containers into the mainstream businesses. Companies may adopt docker or other instead of this, but Microsoft creating their own version of it means its a viable technology. Im more interested in the new frameworks and technologies that get adopted because of this than the fact that its in use. Traditional Java web projects that are hosted on Tomcat/JBoss don't run well inside containers but t…

Could you please explain what kind of issues did you find running tomcat/jboss inside containers? We've been running several apps on docker and so far no problem. Thanks a lot in advance.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#25
post #19
post #7

This will be what takes containers into the mainstream businesses. Companies may adopt docker or other instead of this, but Microsoft creating their own version of it means its a viable technology. Im more interested in the new frameworks and technologies that get adopted because of this than the fact that its in use. Traditional Java web projects that are hosted on Tomcat/JBoss don't run well inside containers but t…

Can you elaborate on, or point me to some reading on the issues with containerizing tomcat and/or jboss? This is not something I've encountered before and may become an issue for me soon. Thanks.

In my experience the Tomcat/JBoss tend to be a relatively large overhead, but since they can run multiple "war" files under the same overhead this is not as much a problem when running a single container for multiple applications. But when you containerize them you'd like to run one instance per application which will multiply the already significant overhead.

Not sure if this is what the GP was referring to, but just my 2 cents.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#26
post #11

Pardon the skepticism, but do "Hyper-V Containers" with "enhanced isolation powered by Hyper-V virtualization" sound suspiciously like, err, Hyper-V virtual machines? And "Server Nano" has a description rather reminiscent of 2008's "Server Core". Is this just about management tools? Because that's cool, too, but why the spin?

From the TechNet Announcement: "we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration…

Since this is all remote powershell, it would be nice if MS/Windows introduced a native SSH server. That would probably help drive some conversion for people used to the posix world.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the TechNet Announcement: "we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration…

Thanks for the clarification. I at first assumed they'd bring OS level virtualization, apparently I'm not the only one. But it's basically just minimal images of windows in regular VMs then... A step in the right direction but still disappointing imo. Linux and BSD are still miles ahead.

So this is like boot2docker ... on Windows? You have a VM and you have containers inside it. This is not the same as containers on baremetal. But that is fine .. my confusion is the OS inside the VM. Is that Linux or Windows? Normally, I can run Ubuntu and Centos-based containers on my box. Can I run these as Hyper V containers? What about dot net? Can that be containerized.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#28
post #7

This will be what takes containers into the mainstream businesses. Companies may adopt docker or other instead of this, but Microsoft creating their own version of it means its a viable technology. Im more interested in the new frameworks and technologies that get adopted because of this than the fact that its in use. Traditional Java web projects that are hosted on Tomcat/JBoss don't run well inside containers but t…

Microsoft creating their own version means the technology is viable? I think people have been using 'the technology' for years, without any input from Microsoft. It doesn't need to be anointed by Microsoft to be 'viable'.

For the tech enthusiast and the visionaries, you are correct; It is a very viable technology. However the majority of people that deploy software are rather conservative and unless they see a market leader such as Microsoft with a solution they don't deem the technology safe to use. This is well documented in a lot of literature like Crossing the Chasm but can be observed frequently if you work at a larger non-tech oriented company. Whether or not this notion is actually correct is debatable but it doesn't change the validity of it.

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#29
post #2

Looking forward to hearing more detail about how this works in the near future. I am curious though what are the plans to orchestrate and pull together multiple containers into an application, like Kubernetes, Mesos, CoreOS, etc? Is that coming in the Win 10 timeframe?

Microsoft is working on Kubernetes support for Azure (along with the Kismatic people); and so I'd bet Kubernetes on Windows itself can't be far behind this announcement.

Many things that appear in Windows Server were already running as part of Azure

Re: Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers

#30
post #24
post #7

This will be what takes containers into the mainstream businesses. Companies may adopt docker or other instead of this, but Microsoft creating their own version of it means its a viable technology. Im more interested in the new frameworks and technologies that get adopted because of this than the fact that its in use. Traditional Java web projects that are hosted on Tomcat/JBoss don't run well inside containers but t…

Could you please explain what kind of issues did you find running tomcat/jboss inside containers? We've been running several apps on docker and so far no problem. Thanks a lot in advance.

Essentially, Java is already run like containers, that container being an application server of some sort. Very rarely is Java software really dependent on specific packages being installed or even which operation system aside from a particular Java VM. When you add another container layer you generally are just adding more overhead and further you have issues with correctly setting some tunable parameters like heap sizes vs container memory sizes, etc. It works, it just isn't very ideal.
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