Daniel Nashed's Blog

Running Domino Windows container image on Windows 2022

Two years ago I have been looking into Domino in a Windows container already.
The main purpose was to understand the technology and if this makes sense to be used in general.

IMHO container technology is mainly helpful on Linux. Containers on Linux use core OS level functionality, which is part of the Linux kernel.
Only Linux makes sense for production use for me.
But a Windows container can be a great test environment for automation testing and other test use cases.
I revisited my container build on Windows this weekend and first updated it to Domino 14 and also updated all involved tooling like 7Zip.
In addition I looked into how I could leverage a Windows container image for testing.

Docker Desktop vs Windows 2024 container services

Windows containers can either run on Docker Desktop or on Windows 2024 server using the Container environment.

When running on a Windows server you have to choose one of the container environments.
There are basically two environments which are mainly used:

• Docker back-end with docker command-line
• Containerd with nerdctl command-line

I have been mainly focusing on the Docker based environment for now. But Containerd should work as well.

Helpful tooling for Windows containers

There is no Remote Desktop or other graphical interface available for a container.
None of the remote tools like VNC work. A Windows container is really headless.
So you need to use command-line functionality for all your work.

Editing files would work over a host mapping. Taskmgr can be replaced by "tasklist".
But there are a couple of commands which would be useful to have in a container.

Windows Git client brings a lot of useful tools including "vi" (vim)

In the Linux world most operations are performed on a command-line in a SSH session.
Most of the Linux tools are available on Windows.

The Git client comes with a Git bash and a lot of useful commands you can use in a Windows command prompt.
This includes openssl, vi, nano (if you really prefer it ..) and most other Linux tools.

The OpenSSL version is much more up to date than what is available for Window.
The curl command tool does come without the Windows schannel security integration

When I started looking into Domino in a Windows container I already built a small domino.cmd start script, which can be used to start and stop Domino.
Everyone knowing the Linux start script should recognize the following output ...

Is anyone looking into Windows containers in general?
What are you using it for? I would be interested to hear from the field.
How do you like the idea of using Windows containers for testing?

-- Daniel

docker exec -it domino cmd

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.20348.2529]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\>domino stop

Stopping Domino for Windows
... waiting for shutdown to complete
... waiting 10 seconds
... waiting 20 seconds
Domino stopped (23 sec)
Domino for Windows shutdown completed

C:\>

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