Using WSL 2 on Windows Server 2022 to run Linux containers

It's working for me, thanks!

To access you WSL Environment from Windows Command line, use the "wsl" command.

wsl sudo docker version

To avoid the password input here, configure "sudo" for your needs.

In WSL environment use the command

sudo nano /etc/sudoers.d/YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME

that file must contain a line like

YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

of course, you have to replace YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME by your windows user name

Hi TylerDotDo, Yes. PowerShell will interact with the Windows instance by default. You might to check this option: Accessing network applications with WSL | Microsoft Learn I'm not a Linux expert, but you might be able to remotely manage the Docker aspect of the Linux utility VM that WSL2 runs and operate as if it was a remote host. I have not tried this, though, so let us know if that works.

Hi! I was excited to set up WSL, because I needed to run a linux container in windows and be able to manage that container via powershell.  Unfortunately, running docker ps/docker inspect within the windows environment does not access the containers in the WSL environment.  Is that expected?  Any way to make that happen?

That is correct mathiasatibis. LCOW was an experimental feature.

My suggestion in this case is that you open an issue with the WSL team directly. They check for issues here: Issues · microsoft/WSL (github.com)

Technically, WSL runs a utility VM, but you don't need to manage it. Running a full Linux VM moves the management burden to you (and your IT Team) but gives you more flexibility. Again, please note that even if the WSL team does figure out how to keep the utility VM running as a service and it solves for your specific issue, it is still not supported for production.

Thanks for your reply, ViniciusApolinario!

The issue is that the IT department often only wants to support Windows VMs. So I need to run docker on a Windows Server VM and linux containers on that. In the past I've used LCOW for that. It was somewhat painful compared to docker on linux, but it worked and is stable. However, I read that LCOW was deprecated in favor of WSL, so I was hoping to at least find comparable functionality. But do i understand correctly that that's no longer available?

mathiasatibis Please note WSL2 (both on Windows client and server) is for development and test only. If you are looking for a production environment or more robust setup, my recommendation is to run a full Linux VM on Hyper-V. That will ensure the VM runs regardless of the host (as long as the host is running, of course) and you can expose the VM to the network and subsequently the container.

Hi,

i followed this way of setting up docker to run Linux containers on Windows Server 2022. It all works fine, but there's a big caveat: when not logged in, it looks like WSL2 turns itself off after a while. So the webapp I deployed on a client machine (just a proof of concept, luckily) turns itself off after a while as well.

Is this expected behavior, and can you recommend another, more stable way of running Linux containers on Windows Server 2022?

Thanks!

Hello,

I followed the steps and installed Docker in Ubuntu successfully. I was able to run the hello-world container in Ubuntu. However, I am not able to use the following Docker commands in PowerShell:

• docker ps
• docker run
• docker images

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? See the screenshot below.

Thank you for your help.

sberube 

Use the VBE script it works,

and change the command to "wsl -d Ubuntu-20.04 -u root service docker start", vbHide

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1177273/is-there-an-easy-way-to-have-wsl-ubuntu-services-start-automatically-on-windows#1178910