Install-Module -Name DockerMsftProvider -Repository PSGallery -Force This provider will enable the container feature on your machine and install Docker-this will require a reboot. To install Docker we'll use the OneGet provider PowerShell module.

To begin installing SQL Server in a Windows container, you need to prepare your host for the container feature. Therefore, this is not a basic question to which we can give an answer in one sentence. There are also some options to provide persistent volumes to containers. On the other hand, interest in stateful applications is growing, and people are looking at ways to leverage container technology for deploying stateful applications in order to improve bare metal efficiency. You can fire up hundreds of containers, do what you want, and then destroy them. Some say that only stateless applications make sense for container scenarios as they don’t care about data. The discussion about which applications are a good fit for containers has been running for a long time. The second question you may ask is whether running a database inside a container is a good idea or not. Microsoft is still looking for possible ways to license SQL Server hosted in containers. The full edition of SQL Server, however, requires you to have licenses in place. Well, my answer would be 'licensing issues.' As you are probably aware, SQL Server Express is the free edition of SQL Server and does not create any licensing conflict in container scenarios. You may ask why they are offering only Express edition rather than full SQL Server. They also recently uploaded a SQL Server Express container image and made it publicly available on DockerHub. If you browse DockerHub for 'Microsoft,' you will find plenty of images ready to use. Microsoft is also doing a great job of contributing to communities and DockerHub.

If you are familiar with Docker, you can keep on using it as before with native Docker commands, or you can chose our lovely PowerShell cmdlets for container tasks. Redmond didn’t only introduce the capability to run containers in Windows but also provided native Docker shell support. Microsoft also wants to be in this game and recently announced support for containers on Windows operating systems and Hyper-V VMs. Some people call it the next version of virtualization others think VMs and Containers have different use cases and it’s better to run them side-by-side.

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