How to pull windows nano server docker image successfully in windows server 2016?

Question

I need to run a nano server docker image in windows server 2016, but whenever I am trying to pull the image is going to retrying..mode I need some suggestion to solve it. The command is : docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/windows/nanoserver:10.0.14393.953

Answer 1

The "latest" tag is no longer available, and per Microsoft's indications on container/host compatibility , you will not be able to use any container image with a kernel version newer than the host's (Windows Server 2016). That is the meaning of the error that you mention in the comments:

If I use 1909 as tag it's throwing an error as no matching manifest for windows/amd64 10.0.14393 in the manifest list entries that's why I am using the above the tag

The solution is to use images with the same Windows version, which are currently tagged as:

mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2016
mcr.microsoft.com/windows/nanoserver:sac2016

Note that the Nano Server tag was unlisted (as it was EOLed on October 2018) and in order to actually find it in the list you have to go into the full tags list . You should consider it deprecated and subject to removal without prior notice.

Finally, the 1607/sac2016 version of Nano Server is significantly different to later versions (esp. 1803 onwards) in that it is much bigger (1.1GB in sac2016 vs 260MB in 1909) but it also includes many functionalities that were removed in later versions, like PowerShell. Thus, be careful if you plan on writing Dockerfiles that you want to be able to build FROM a Nano Server image in both your system and in later versions. This may not be a big concern because newer versions of Windows are able to run the the older Nano Server container anyway, but if you plan on making your Dockerfile public people will probably question why you are using an EOLed large image as your base instead of a newer, slimmer one.

Answer 2

There is no latest tag for this image

Try

docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/windows/nanoserver:1909