Microsoft Windows Server 2004: This update will help you get the most out of containers

The solution to “my version of Windows Server is about to lose support” was “upgrade to a newer version”. But if you kept running an older version, such as Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, it’s probably not because you didn’t want to take the time to upgrade. It’s probably because you were running line-of-business applications that didn’t improve on a newer OS, so the cost and downtime of upgrading outweighed the security benefits. .

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Microsoft has been pushing organizations to modernize these server applications to run in containers – perhaps adding new features, but definitely making them more portable so it’s easier to keep the system up to date. operating system on which they run. Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) releases of Windows Server are where updates to this container platform show up the fastest, so you’re unlikely to experience the cognitive dissonance of Windows’ move Server 2008 to Windows Server 2004. But those who have already started working on modernizing server applications will see some welcome improvements in this new release, especially for .NET.

The focus on reducing the download size of Windows Server container images continues (see chart below): Windows Server 2004 is approximately 20% smaller than with WS 1909; the on-disk size is also smaller – just under 4 GB instead of just under 5 GB. This makes it faster to download a container and deploy it.

Much of the space saving comes from moving most of the NGEN performance optimization from the Server Core image to the .NET Framework runtime image. Windows Server ships with native .NET binaries precompiled with NGEN, which makes them faster but also increases the image size. The Server Core image now has a much smaller set of precompiled binaries – only x86 and X64 versions of mscorlib.dll, System.dll and System.Core.dll, plus a serviced version of the .NET Framework .

Even with the additional NGEN files, the .NET Framework image is also smaller. This is partly because many traditional Windows Server applications are ASP.NET web applications and NGEN optimization is now targeted at ASP.NET applications and PowerShell scripts, and partly because the image is now built to avoid the bloat you get from updating files through the Dockerfile. which builds the image (which adds multiple copies of the file). Instead of installing and then patching the .NET Framework, the image loads Windows Server Core to get the .NET Framework and then uses NGEN to precompile only 64-bit assemblies for PowerShell and ASP.NET.

Admin-friendly containers

Although not related to Windows Server 2004, the Windows Administrative Center (WAC) also facilitates the use of containers on Windows Server.

In the past, Microsoft put a lot of emphasis on developer tools to build and debug applications in containers, but that didn’t help system administrators who used to provide virtual machine infrastructure to run apps. WAC has tools to monitor and troubleshoot containers running on Windows Server, but until now it lacked the tools to move existing applications into containers.

There is now an extension that allows WAC to pull container images from container registries such as Docker Hub, create containers (set options such as CPU and RAM allocation, environment and persistent storage the same way you would for VMs), create a new container images and push them to Azure Container Registry (or other registries) so you can use them from different hosts of containers.

The extension is available on the Insider feed, although you can also use it with WAC builds: enable it under Settings / Extensions / Feeds and add the feed https://aka.ms/wac-insiders-feed , then choose the Containers extension from the list of available extensions. You will see the new features under Server Manager when targeting a container host with Docker installed.

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Initially, the creation of new images is limited to containerizing IIS web applications, including static web applications that do not depend on ASP.NET frameworks and applications where you have access to the Visual Studio solution for the application. WAC will support more application types for containerization in the future: .NET and Java applications would be logical additions, as would SQL Server applications given that SQL Server itself is already available through containers.

You can embed PowerShell scripts for configuration, and you can use WAC to update an existing Dockerfile (if you created a container for a previous version of the app and need to rebuild it for a new OS or a new version of the application, for example). And much like the graphical admin tools for Windows Server and Exchange which also created a PowerShell script you can copy for future automation and to help admins learn PowerShell you can see a preview of the Dockerfile in WAC when you complete the configuration. This will help administrators get familiar with how a Dockerfile works, without forcing them to choose new tools to work with containers that are becoming a heavy Windows Server workload.

Before planning installations of Windows Server 2004, check whether you are using parity storage spaces; upgrades to this version are blocked on some hardware configurations as these storage partitions may show as RAW space in disk manager and run CHKDSK to fix which may lead to data loss. If you have already upgraded to Windows Server 2004 and are experiencing the problem, Microsoft advises you to set Storage Spaces to read-only parity until it releases a fix. From a PowerShell administrative console, run Get-VirtualDisk | ? ResiliencySettingName -eq Parity | Get-Disk | Set-Disk -IsReadOnly $true.